


Fight or Flight

by ellispark



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Divergent Season 12, Canon Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, F/M, Family Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Torture, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Miscommunication, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Alternating, Past Child Abuse, Sexual Content, Supernatural Canon Big Bang 2017, Winchesters being Winchesters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-28
Updated: 2017-07-28
Packaged: 2018-12-06 03:50:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11592354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellispark/pseuds/ellispark
Summary: Just when Dean's started to feel good about his life — the end is not nigh, and his brother and his angel are safe in the bunker — Sam and Cas start keeping secrets from him.It's not a big deal, at least not at first. Everyone needs to play some things close to the chest. But when Dean finds out what they've been hiding, the bubble of carefree happiness he's carefully placed around his family finally bursts.





	1. Dean

**Author's Note:**

> All the beautiful art in this fic is by [emotionallyunstabl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Emotionallyunstabl/pseuds/Emotionallyunstabl), who I owe a great many thanks to. Send them some love here or on their [tumblr!](https://emotionallyunstabl.tumblr.com/)

  


Dean’s a little out of it when he wakes to feel the other side of the bed rising slightly, the covers pulling away from him. He blinks blearily at the alarm on the nightstand, the only light in the room. 4:23. 4:23 in the goddamn morning.

“Cas?”

Silence, then he can feel the bed sink down again, a warm hand placed over his back.

“I’m here,” Cas says, rubbing at the tense muscles in Dean’s shoulders through his threadbare t-shirt. Dean rolls over, knocking his hand away.

“You were leaving,” he says, and if he weren’t so damn tired he would school his voice to sound less accusatory. But he’s started to get used to at least six hours of sleep, and Cas just ruined that for the night.

He can’t see Cas in the dark, but he can imagine his frown — that slight downturn of his lips, the little creases between his eyebrows, the narrowing of his eyes.

“I’ll be back. I promise.” Cas runs his hand down Dean’s arm, grabbing Dean's hand and squeezing it lightly before letting go and standing up. Dean wants to ask where he’s going, demand answers, but even though they’ve been, for lack of a better word, "together" for months now, he still doesn’t know if it’s his place to ask shit like that. He doesn’t want Cas to feel tied down, because if Cas feels tied down he’ll probably just leave again, but for good this time.

So he whispers, “Okay,” and lets Cas kiss him on the forehead. Cas moves away with unerring accuracy in such a dark space, and Dean listens to his footsteps echo through the room as he gathers his clothes, hears the door open and close. Dean rolls back over on his stomach, burying his face in his pillow and hoping for sleep that doesn’t come.

///

The coffee nearly burns at breakfast, and Sam has to rescue the eggs before they suffer the same fate.

“Dean,” he says, in his patented bitchy little brother voice, “did you forget how to use appliances?”

Dean, absent-mindedly scanning the news for cases, doesn’t respond.

“Hey!” Sam’s in his face all of a sudden, waving a plate of slightly charred scrambled eggs. “Earth to Dean? What’s wrong with you?”

It takes a second for his eyes to adjust enough to make out Sam’s annoyed scowl.

“Do you know where Cas is this morning?” Dean asks, not answering Sam’s question and yet answering it completely.

Sam pulls out a chair next to Dean, now looking concerned. Dean grimaces at him. He wishes he hadn't asked.

“Well, I’m not the one sleeping with him,” Sam says slowly. “So he doesn’t ever give me his full itinerary.” 

Dean grunts and turns back to the paper.

“Have you texted him?”

He flips a page. Ah, “Woman says husband abducted by aliens.” Maybe that’s something. He marks it with a pen. Sam leans over to read it and shakes his head.

“That’s never our kind of thing.”

“No, it’s never aliens,” Dean corrects. “Could be our kind of thing.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “You never answered my question. Did you text Cas? You know, to communicate? Like boyfriends do.”

Dean really friggin’ hates the word "boyfriend," but he decides to let it slide. That’s not a fight he’ll win. If he admits it makes him feel uncomfortable, Sam will take it as yet another sign of Dean Winchester’s Great Emotional Repression. His kid brother was just so proud when Dean finally manned up and asked Cas to move into his room, and Dean would like to coast on that for a while.

“Yeah, I texted him right before breakfast. He hasn’t responded.”

“He could be busy with angel stuff.”

That’s pretty much exactly what Dean is afraid of. He isn’t going to admit that out loud, though. He’s not going to sound jealous or insecure, not to Sam. He’s going to be the model of a trusting... partner? No, too work-ish. Lover? _Ugh._

“Yeah, maybe.” Dean ignores the eggs Sam is pushing onto his plate, standing and heading to the coffee maker before he remembers that _oh yeah, I ruined the coffee._ “Hey, check out the rest of the paper, will ya? I’m gonna go take a shower.”

Sam shifts uncomfortably.

“Actually, uh, I’m about to head out. I’ve got plans.”

Dean raises an eyebrow.

“Plans? What plans?”

Sam grins, a little fake, a lot sheepish.

“So there’s this exhibition at the Kansas Museum of History...”

“Oh yeah? What is it?”

The brothers stare at each for several seconds. Dean's positive Sam read the challenge in that question for what it was. _I know you’re lying. How quick can you think on your feet?_

Sam blinks, and it’s like his face resets into eager puppy mode. He easily replies, “It’s an exhibition on soil types used for —”

“Fuck no.” Dean grimaces and waves a hand. “Go. Enjoy your dirt, you giant ass nerd.”

He watches his brother practically sprint out of the room, a hollow ache in his chest. Dean doesn’t know what the hell is going on here, but then again, why should he be surprised? Of course Cas and Sam want some time away from him. He’s overbearing and needy. 

Dean grabs the coffee pot and moves to the sink, turning it on full blast and washing away the charred roast at the bottom. He can do this for them — take a deep breath and a step back, not ask too many questions, not poke at obvious excuses. Everyone needs a little alone time, right? Dean can give that. He’s good at giving.

He watches the burnt flakes drift down the disposal and wishes that Cas would at least text him back.

///

Cas comes home late, past dinner. 

Dean’s stayed up, feeling sort of like an annoyed parent in a sitcom, eyes on the kitchen clock, Cas and Sam’s food cooling on the table. Next he'll be calling them, saying "You better get home right now young man" or some other crap like that.

When Cas stops in the doorway and smiles softly at him, tentatively saying, “Hello, Dean,” Dean’s tempted to ignore him completely. It’s what he would have done before they were... whatever they are. But he’s trying to do this right, and that means talking things out, as much as he hates the idea.

“So,” he says, “where were you?”

Cas fidgets a bit before walking over to the table and sitting down next to Dean.

“I texted you.”

“Yeah.” Dean scoffs. He pulls out his phone, opens up his messages. "'Dean, I’m running an errand. Be back later. Love you.’ Cas, that doesn’t explain anything.”

Dean’s aware he might be edging into possessive territory, but come on. He’s waited all day for Sam and Cas to come home, and the patient veneer he’s thinly painted over his overprotective outer shell is chipping away in chunks.

Cas reaches over the table to take one of Dean’s restless hands, turning it over, palm side up. He starts running his fingers along Dean's palm, tracing the lifeline and the calluses again and again. Dean almost wants to pull away. Cas knows how much he loves this, the gentle attention to one of the most weathered parts of his body. It’s not fair to use it against him.

“That’s cheating,” he mutters.

A corner of Cas’s mouth ticks up in that little half-smile Dean adores, the one he finds impossible to resist.

“If I tell you I’m not quite ready to share with you what I was doing, will you trust me?” Cas asks.

Dean stares at the table, following a crack in the surface with his eyes and trying to decide what to say, how to feel.

 _Space. You decided to give them space._ He takes a deep breath.

“Promise me that whatever it is it’s not something stupid. Not something you shouldn’t be doing alone.” He looks back up at Cas, who nods solemnly. “And you will tell me eventually, right?”

“Absolutely,” Cas says, firm and resolute. “I promise.”

It doesn’t make Dean feel 100 percent better, but hey, at least they talked. Communication, like Sam always (hypocritically) reminds him, is the key to solid relationships. Jeez, Dean hates that he can hear his little brother’s Relationships 101 lecture playing on a loop in his brain.

Cas squeezes Dean’s hand, bringing his attention back to the present. 

“I’m sorry I missed dinner, but I’m not really hungry right now. Would you mind if I leave mine for Sam? We can go to bed...”

Cas drops his voice in a way that’s probably supposed to be suggestive on that last sentence, but it comes out sounding like he’s got a bad cough. Dean can’t help but laugh a little.

“Yeah, yeah Casanova. Whatever you want.”

///

A pattern develops over the next few weeks.

Sam and Cas keep going out. Cas seems to be adhering to a schedule, one that Dean picks up on after waking up alone several times. He heads out early, by 5 a.m. every Wednesday, and then every other Saturday he’s out almost all day. 

Dean can’t resist pressing after a month of this goes by.

“What’s going on?” he asks Cas one weekend, as he and Sam are gearing up for a hunt Cas declined to attend, eyes down as he said, “I have something I have to take care of.”

Sam bolted out of the room at that point, announcing, “I’m going to load the car” to no one. Dean and Cas were too preoccupied staring each other down over the war room table, Dean angry, Cas nervous.

“It’s —” Cas swirls a hand in the air like that can encompass everything he can’t, or won’t, explain. “An appointment I can’t miss.”

For some reason the first thing that pops into Dean’s head is visions of hospitals and lab coats, although none of them — Sam, Cas, or Dean — have ever been seriously ill. Maybe Chuck does smile down on them every once in a while.

Still, he asks, “Like doctors’ appointments?” and he can’t help the way his voice cracks on the tail end of the question. Cas is almost graceless now. He could get sick. Dean could lose him.

Cas has always been able to read him pretty well, so Dean’s not entirely taken aback when Cas swiftly crosses around to the other side of the table and pulls Dean into his arms.

“No,” he says, soothingly running his hands down Dean’s back. “It’s nothing to worry about, Dean, I swear.”

 _Then why won’t you tell me?_ Dean wants to scream. He pulls back and looks Cas in the eyes. They’re wide and blue and worried and loving, and Dean still feels somewhat uncomfortable with that last part, so he turns away.

“I want it to be a surprise. For you,” Cas says. “Just — Trust me, remember?”

And Dean feels silly all of sudden — a surprise, for him, and he’d been thinking the worst — so he just nods, and Cas kisses him on the cheek before he goes. Dean doesn’t call after him, doesn’t say "By the way, I hate surprises," doesn’t mention that a lifetime of needing to know what’s coming next in case whatever it is wants to kill him has taken all the fun out of not-knowing. 

Dean needs to know. But Cas needs his trust, so he’ll give it.

Sam, though.

Sam is trickier to pin down and possibly behaving even stranger than Cas.

There’s no pattern to when he decides to leave, and the excuses fluctuate. One day he needs to pick up steel-cut oats, but “Only the kind they have at that place in Hastings will work, Dean,” the next day he’s going to watch a documentary about the domestication of reindeer at some indie theater in Topeka or some other bullshit.

The thing is, Dean's fairly sure sometimes Sam’s going exactly where he says he’s going, like the time he gripes Dean out for forgetting to stock up on coffee beans and then says he’s taking the three-hour round-trip to some specialty shop somewhere in Nebraska to pick up more. He comes back with the best damn coffee that has ever passed Dean’s lips, and Dean really believes that that’s all Sam did.... this time.

But for every true story there are at least three lies.

Dean can’t bring himself to call Sam out the way he will with Cas because, if he’s being honest, he’s afraid Sam will just lie even more. Cas, well... Cas sucks at lying when directly confronted. He can lie by omission, talking around the topic and ducking out when things get too uncomfortable, but if Dean were to say, “Cas, tell me the goddamn truth,” he knows that Cas would spill his guts. Especially now that they’re together. He hopes that’s the case, anyway.

But Sam knows how to lie to someone’s face with utter conviction because Dean taught him how. So when one day his little brother says, “Hey, I’m going to go visit Eileen,” when Dean knows damn well she’s in Ireland for the week, he doesn’t call Sam out on it.

“Have fun,” he says to the lore book he’s reading, unable to bear saying it to Sam’s retreating back. Cas sits next to Dean, drinking some of that fancy ass coffee, and once Sam’s gone he says, “I thought she was in Ireland?” and Dean nearly throws his own cup across the room.

He doesn’t, though. _Space._ He breathes in, breathes out. _Give him some space._

“Dean?” Cas’s concern rouses him from his thoughts.

“Yeah, yeah she is.” Dean looks at Cas, who squints back at him. It’s a worried squint. Dean reaches across the table to take his hand, squeezing it until Cas squeezes back. “So you — you don’t know what he’s doing?”

Dean had half-heartedly hoped maybe Cas and Sam were working together on whatever-the-fuck this "surprise" is, even though they seem to be gone on completely different schedules most of the time, and Sam seems genuinely confused whenever Cas ducks out on weekends without a word to either of them.

“I thought he was spending more time with Eileen and couldn’t bear your teasing anymore.” Dean snorts, and Cas just rolls his eyes. “You can be fairly insufferable toward him. But...” Cas trails off, looking toward the door that Sam just exited through. “That was a blatant lie.”

They sit in silence, and Dean wonders what the fuck he’s done wrong that Sam’s hiding things from him again.

///

There’s a possible possession case in Topeka, and that’s enough to distract Dean from obsessing over lies and lack of communication for a while, especially because Cas and Sam are both on board for once.

It’s Eileen’s case, really, and when she greets Sam with a smacking kiss right on the lips, Dean and Cas both dutifully pretend to be surprised.

“Wow,” Dean says, grinning uncontrollably at the sight of Sam’s very red face. “I just had no idea it was like that.” Sam flips him off and starts walking into the motel room where Eileen’s already set up a sort of home base. “When can I expect to be made an uncle?”

Eileen shakes her head at him, but she’s smiling. She signs a _“Hello”_ to Cas, who signs back something too fast for Dean to catch. Then they’re both laughing and Dean’s the one who’s miffed, grumbling to Cas, “You’re gonna tell me later what that was all about.”

 _It’s nice,_ Dean thinks, sometime later when they’re all lounging around the room, drinking and shooting the breeze now that they’ve finished discussing the case. _This is nice._

Cas took off his trench coat and loosened his tie, something that usually only happens after several beers or as a prelude to sex (Dean can hope this time it’s both), and he’s flipping through the channels on the crappy motel television set, trying to find _House Hunters_ so he and Sam can watch it like the dorks they are. Sam sits on the edge of the other bed reading the directory and arguing with Cas about the merits of backyard kitchens or some other shit that neither of them have any reference for but still feel strongly about. Eileen is sprawled out behind Sam, poking him in the back with her feet and teaching Dean how to sign dirty words. He occasionally smacks Cas on the shoulder to get his attention and show off his new vocabulary, which makes Cas smile wide, gums and all. 

_Yeah. Nice._ Dean takes a pull of his beer and thinks that he can just picture them doing this all of the time, the four of them, and it doesn’t make him antsy the way it would have a few years ago. Doesn’t make him want to take Sam and run, doesn’t make him crave the empty road in front of him with just his brother beside him, the two of them against the world. They’ve found a new family, him and Sam, first in Cas and now in Eileen, and Dean thinks he could get used to this. He could get used to watching his brother and Cas have pointless, all-in-good-fun arguments, could get used to Eileen’s laughter as he butchers another sign, could get used to crowded motel rooms and this feeling of contentment.

That won’t stop him from giving Sam shit about his love life, though.

“Come on,” he pleads once Sam and Cas finally give up on _House Hunters_ and Sam is trying to shove him out the door. “We never get two rooms on hunts!”

“Yeah,” Sam huffs, “and I’ve heard you and Cas having ‘quiet sex’ at least half a dozen times. I’m not subjecting Eileen to that.”

“Eileen can’t hear!”

“She’d be able to see you groping each other. It’s not like you’re subtle about it!”

Eileen’s obliviously watching HGTV and thankfully misses that comment. 

“I told you he could hear us,” Cas says, nonchalantly pushing past the bickering brothers and out the door. “Dean, don’t you want to have sex tonight?”

It’s not like Dean's going to turn that down, but he laments Cas’s complete lack of shame all the same, especially when it turns Dean-makes-fun-of-Sam time into Sam-makes-fun-of-Dean time.

“Yeah Dean, don’t you want to have sex tonight?” Sam gives him one final shove. Caught off guard and slightly off-balance after a few beers, Dean stumbles the rest of the way out of the room. “Have fun!”

The door slams in his face.

“Was he being sarcastic?” Cas asks, tilting his head to the side.

Dean snorts. “Nah, man. He really wants us to get it on.” He teasingly thrusts his hips and throws in an obscene hand gesture for good measure.

The corner of Cas’s mouth tips up in a knowing smirk. 

“Well,” he says drily, holding out his hand. “Let’s get to it. I’d hate to disappoint Sam.”

///

Sex with Cas is about as far from complicated as things get.

See, Dean used to think no-strings hookups with waitresses and random bar women were uncomplicated, so long as both parties made it clear from the get-go that they didn’t want anything more than a one night stand. But truthfully, something about those encounters always stressed Dean out. He always felt determined to make those women feel good, but he never spent enough time with them to figure out what exactly made them tick — or vice versa. The older he got, the more complicated those one night stands felt — maybe they left satisfied, but Dean would still be lying there trying to figure out how he could have preformed better, why meaningless sex was never as great as it used to be.

With Cas it’s never a performance, and it’s never, ever meaningless.

Terrifying the first time, yeah, because it meant so much. But always good, even when it’s awkward or lazy or rushed, because Dean knows without a doubt that Cas cares about _him_ , not just about his body or his prowess in bed. Cas approaches sex like it’s yet another way for him to learn everything there is to know about Dean, and Dean kind of likes the attention.

He also really, really likes the way it feels.

They haven’t moved too fast tonight — both a little tired and Dean a little tipsy — but there’s still a naked Cas, thrusting lightly against his hip, panting against his neck, and Dean feels good.

“Right there,” he murmurs, tapping Cas’s hip until he moves a little to the left. His dick slides right against Dean’s and they both groan. “Yeah, yeah. Like that.” He gasps the words out, breath uneven from arousal and the weight of Cas on top of him, pushing into his stomach. There won’t be a lot of filthy bedroom talk from Dean tonight, and there’s never much from Cas, but it doesn’t really matter. 

“Good?” Cas mouths at his neck and then his shoulder, not sucking hard enough to leave a bruise. They both hate marking each other up, leaving any black and blue spots to serve as reminders of their past, less-than-friendly encounters. It doesn’t get talked about, but it’s implicitly understood.

“Yeah.” Dean breathes out again. Everything feels hot and tight, ready to be let loose. “It’s good.” He can feel Cas smile against his neck, and he runs a hand soothingly down his back. “It’s good.”

When Cas comes Dean feels it first, spilling over his own dick and both of their stomachs. Cas has a sort of delayed reaction to orgasms, silently riding the first wave before gasping through the rest. Dean can’t see him in the darkness of the room, but he hears him, and that pushes Dean rapidly toward his own release. There’s nothing mind-blowing about this particular orgasm, but Dean’s eyes start to water as Cas pulls him impossibly closer, holding him through it and whispering endearments to the top of his head. 

Cas is so damn sentimental sometimes, and it makes Dean feel light-headed and warm and cared for all at once.

He lets Cas handle clean-up this time, allowing himself to be manhandled, loose and content. When Cas finally crawls back into bed, Dean rolls toward him and lazily reaches a hand out, satisfied when Cas grabs it. It doesn’t take him long to fall asleep.

Dean wakes later, cold and alone in bed. Cas is sitting at the room’s desk, reading what looks like an ancient textbook, pages worn and dog-eared and browned. He grunts in disappointment.

“Cas, c’mon. It’s like —” he looks at the bedside clock. “Jesus, 4:52. What are you doing?”

Cas carefully closes the book, and Dean tries not to be hurt by the way he immediately puts it in his bag, like it’s something he has to hide.

“I don’t need as much sleep as you do, Dean.” Cas sort of negates the words by coming back to the bed. Dean’s pleased to note that he's is still naked, and even more pleased when he slides in right behind Dean, throwing an arm around him loosely. 

“That’s bullshit,” Dean whispers, already succumbing to his own weariness, eyelids drooping, mystery book forgotten. “You’re like a... like a... what are those animals that hang? And they’re slow?” Words are escaping him now.

“Sloths, Dean. Sloths.” 

“Yeah, that. That’s you.” He yawns. “Sleep all day if we let you.”

Cas just hums, a neutral sound, and Dean closes his eyes.

///

Ellen Weatherby, longtime resident of Topeka, chair of her local garden club, Sunday School teacher at First United Methodist, grandmother of five, has indeed been possessed. Her husband saw the black eyes, and he’ll talk about it to anyone who will listen.

Dean and Sam let Cas and Eileen handle that particular interview. It’s Eileen’s case, and Cas needs the practice. When Cas interviews witnesses or suspects they either think he’s a freak or they fall in love with him, and when it’s super religious folk like Gerald Weatherby it’s almost always the latter. That nearly dormant grace, probably — Dean can feel it sometimes, when Cas is close enough, and surely people who want to believe in a higher power can feel it, too — but Cas doesn’t like to talk about it. He told Dean once that should he ever lose his grace again he wanted to choose how it happened. But in the end it was stolen, again. Dean doesn’t want to talk about that. Just the thought of what happened to Cas causes his blood pressure to rise.

The Winchesters watch their significant others take coffee with a worried husband from across a cluttered café. Sam sips his drink and Dean tries to stomp down the urge to go over there and take charge once more than 20 minutes have passed.

“They’re fine.” Sam doesn’t even look up from his laptop. “Stop it.”

“He’s crying,” Dean mutters, and Sam finally turns around to look across the room. “He’s been crying for like five minutes, at least.”

Gerald is hunched over the table, head in his hands, shoulders shuddering. Eileen has her hand comfortingly resting on his shoulder, saying something too quietly to hear from this far away. Cas looks mildly perplexed. Human emotions in all their complexity and suddenness are still somewhat foreign to him, especially when he has to process the reactions of total strangers.

Sam turns back and closes his laptop.

“His wife is possessed, Dean. I think it’s understandable that he’s upset. Imagine how you’d feel.”

“I don’t have to imagine,” Dean snaps, then immediately runs the back of his hand across his mouth, feeling guilty. 

He hates how Sam’s eyes fill with obvious pity. “Right, sorry, I... right.” Sam laughs humorlessly. “Guess we both already know how that feels.”

Dean doesn’t respond, because what is there to say? _I remember every second of you and Cas being possessed by Lucifer, of you and Gadreel and you and Meg and you and every other thing that’s clawed its way down your throat. It feels like standing on a knife’s edge and one wrong move and you impale yourself and the person you love. It feels like guilt and heartache and loss and not being able to cry because you have to treat it like another mission — save Sam, save Cas. It feels like waking up next to Cas and still sometimes seeing the devil because I failed him; like looking at your hands and seeing the hands that killed Kevin because I let the wrong one in._ He throws back what’s left of his coffee almost violently. “I’m gonna get another. You want one?”

Sam reaches out to grab Dean’s arm, dragging him back into his seat. 

“Dude,” he protests, but it’s weak in the face of Sam’s puppy eyes.

“Hey,” Sam says quietly. “We’re all here. We’re good. We’re safe. We’re together. That’s what you want, right?”

There’s something there under the concern in Sam’s voice, in that last question, something Dean can’t quite read. He doesn’t like it.

“Yeah, I want everyone to be safe. Don’t you?”

Sam leans back in his chair and takes a slow sip of his coffee.

“Everyone,” he responds eventually, nodding. “I want everyone to be safe and together, too.”

They sit in silence for a while before Sam says, “I’m going to be spending a few extra days here after the case is over.”

Dean snorts, glad to have moved into safer territory.

“Dude, if you want some time alone with your lady friend, just say so.”

But Sam doesn’t smile or crack jokes or even have the decency to look flustered. He drops his eyes to the table and bites his lower lip, and it’s then that Dean knows something is up.

“Sammy?”

“I think Cas is gonna stay, too. Without you.” Sam looks up and says almost pleadingly, “It’s not a big deal, Dean, we just —”

And here Dean was thinking that their weird behavior was entirely unrelated, Cas with his “surprise” and Sam with his “space,” but no, they’re both going behind his back to the same end. The two people he loves more than anything, and they’re confiding in each other instead of him.

“What the fuck! Why is everyone scrambling to ditch me?” All the hurt he’d held back, watching Sam tell his stupid stories about where he goes, watching Cas leave their room before dawn, comes pouring out of his mouth. “What are you doing that I can’t be here for? Why are you lying to me _again_?” 

Dean’s only aware that he’s shouting when most of the background noise in the café dies out. He looks past Sam, who’s wearing a firm, battle-ready grimace, to see that nearly everyone is looking at their table, including Cas and Eileen and Gerald. Cas stands up, leaning over to say something to Gerald and Eileen before walking toward the Winchesters.

Dean clenches and unclenches his fists and tries not to let frustrated tears spill. It seems like only a second before Cas is there, closing his hand around one of those fists and pulling up a seat between the brothers. Dean can’t even look at him right now.

“Tell me what’s going on,” he says through clenched teeth. Cas squeezes his hand hesitantly.

“Look, we’re going to tell you, but we’re not ready yet,” Sam says, voice hard and unyielding, and Cas says, “Oh” softly, like he’s just realized what the yelling was about.

“So you’re in this together, huh?” Dean’s angry now, because they acted like they didn’t know what the other was doing for all these weeks, because they piled the lies so high on top of each other that now he can’t see around them. 

“Well,” Cas says slowly, “it’s... Now, I suppose... But we weren’t...”

It’s not like him to have this much trouble explaining himself. Cas is always so blunt, so steady, always says what he’s thinking unless he’s afraid Dean won’t like it.

He forcefully pulls his hand out of Cas’s, ignoring the wounded look on Cas’s face. Sam starts to protest, saying, “Dean, would you just —” but Dean cuts him off by standing up so abruptly his chair almost topples over. 

“I’m gonna wait in the car.”

///

They follow the trail of dead bodies to a field outside of Topeka where Ellen Weatherby is sitting on a rock in the middle of the grass, sans demon, sobbing against the shoulder of Mary Winchester.

And suddenly it all makes sense.

Eileen rushes forward to check on the elderly woman whose experience as a demonic vessel was assuredly unpleasant. Dean saw one of the bodies left in the demon’s wake, and it wasn't pretty — guts unspooled, eyes ripped out. Dean knows Ellen will never forget it.

Sam and Cas stand behind him, and even though he can’t see them Dean knows they’re waiting to see what he’ll do. He’s barely spoken to them in the past 24 hours, and if a part of him wondered if his earlier anger was unjustified, he doesn’t wonder anymore.

“So this is it,” he says without turning around. “You’re sneaking around to see Mary.”

It’s not a question. He knows the answer now.

“Um,” Sam says, while Cas says, “Partially, yes.” Dean hears them shuffling behind him, likely communicating to each other with hand gestures and eye movements as they settle on some version of this story they think will make him less pissed. Dean keeps his eyes on his so-called mother, who’s still cradling the sobbing woman but looking directly at him. She looks sad. He very valiantly tries not to care.

Suddenly Sam is standing next to him, nodding to Cas as he walks around the brothers to see the survivor. For a moment Dean feels a wave of love for Cas, because seeing an angel will surely help the poor woman, but then the anger sweeps that love right back out to sea.

“Cas didn’t know,” Sam says. “Not for a long time. That’s not why he’s staying in Topeka, but it is why I am.”

Dean doesn’t say anything. He watches Cas kneel in front of Ellen and take her hands. Mary rubs Ellen’s back but looks at Cas, and that’s what does it. Dean starts to walk purposefully toward them, fists clenched.

“Dean!” Sam shouts, but he won’t be deterred, not even by the fear in the voice of his brother. He reaches the huddle around Ellen and grabs Mary’s arm more forcefully than is strictly necessary, yanking her up and away from Cas. He doesn’t pay any attention when Cas says, “Wait, Dean —” as he pulls her a good ten yards away from everyone else. 

Sam, however stupid he might have been up to this point, thankfully stands a respectful distance away, warily watching his brother and mother face off.

“I have every right to work this case —”

“I told you if I ever saw you near him again —”

“Dean, I have apologized and apologized and I don’t know what else to do!” The way her voice cracks is not breaking his heart. It’s not.

“You can’t do anything!” Dean gets up into her face and watches with satisfaction as her eyes widen in something like fear. It shouldn’t feel good, to make his mother afraid, but it does. Sometimes Dean wonders if Sam and Cas truly removed all the black smoke from his soul. “You try to kill someone I love, that’s it for you! Game over, we’re done!” 

Mary doesn’t look well anyway — she’s thinner than he remembers, her face drawn and pale, eyes watery — but that look, like Dean’s slapped her... 

“I am your mother,” she says, shaking but forceful. “And I love you regardless of how you may feel about me.”

 _No_ , Dean wants to say, _because if you loved me you wouldn’t have done what you did. If you loved me you wouldn’t have let Sam lie to me. If you loved me you would have kept them away from Cas._

_If you loved me, you wouldn’t have acted like Dad._

He clenches his jaw and glances over at Sam and Cas, who’ve migrated to stand just a few feet away. They both look pathetic, sad, wide eyed with downturned mouths. He’s still angry, but Dean knows who his real family is, and it’s them, his stupid brother and his idiot angel, who always do the wrong things for the right reasons, piling up miscalculated deeds with good intentions until something breaks.

Dean’s not going to be the broken thing here. Not today. He turns away from his mother, says, “Sam, Cas, let’s go,” in a tone that brooks no argument. Eileen is still sitting with Ellen Weatherby, and Dean nods at them, too, a jerk of his head toward the car.

They leave Mary in the field, alone.


	2. Sam

His mother calls him three weeks after they get Cas back.

When Sam sees “Mary Winchester” flash across his phone (not “Mom,” not anymore) he almost doesn’t answer. He’s alone in the bunker — Dean and Cas went out to shop for groceries or something — and he’s not sure he can handle this conversation by himself.

But she’s his mother. She’s the only parent he has.

Not that that will stop him from keeping her at arm’s length.

“What do you want?”

Mary sighs over the line, and Sam briefly wonders where she is now. Maybe a truck stop in Missouri, a diner in South Dakota, a rundown motel in Indiana. Surely she’s not with them. Surely, after everything, she’s seen them for what they are, the real monsters they are.

“Sam, please. I just want to talk.”

He’s in his bedroom, pacing, so he picks up a knife from his desk, swirling it between his fingers so he’ll have something to do with his hands. If he trips up and cuts himself at least that’ll give him a different type of pain to focus on, a pain separate from betrayal and destroyed expectations. 

“So talk,” Sam says stiffly.

She sighs again. “Look, I... I know what you must think of me, but I promise I didn’t mean to hurt you. Either of you. Any of you.”

“You hurt Cas, you hurt us. You kill Cas, you practically kill Dean.” Sam wants to hang up, but he wants to let all this anger out even more. “And that would kill me. So that’s bullshit, Mom.” 

God, even though he's pissed as hell he still doesn't know how Dean does it, how he cut her off so swiftly and permanently, how he calls her “Mary” while sneering. Sam felt that way about their father — every lighter emotion morphed into visceral anger and disappointment verging on hatred, and to this day he regrets that he can’t say with certainty that he loved his dad or his dad loved him. He didn’t want it to be that way with her, but how can it be any other way? Sam's always the one talking about saving people, but then he’s also the one always lecturing Dean about thinking with your head and not your heart. His head says this can’t be saved.

Mary’s not saying anything, but he can hear her breathing heavily.

“You know what Cas means to us, and you...” Sam doesn’t want to talk about it. Sometimes he still looks at Cas and sees his bruised, battered face, and he feels nothing but gut-wrenching guilt and blinding rage. “You don’t know how family works.”

Then he does hang up, turning his phone off for good measure. Sam goes over to his bed and flops onto it, legs dangling off the edge. It’s not a comfortable position, but Sam’s not really used to being comfortable. He spent too much of his life getting dragged across the country on a revenge quest he didn’t understand, being used up by supernatural forces and spat back out again, watching his brother and all his friends and loved ones die over and over and over to get used to comfort of any kind. And all of it, all that pain, was set in motion by a woman he couldn’t remember.

His mom. Mary. The perfect figure, dressed in white, who loved him unconditionally in his dreams, the few times he did dream of her.

There’s one dream in particular that happens more often than the others. He’s in college still, at Stanford. Jess is never there, but he can see her all over his apartment, in the shoes she left by the front door, in the paintings she meticulously crafted hanging in the living room. His mom and dad and Dean are visiting, like they would if Sam had ever had a normal life. Dad and Dean are in the kitchen. Sam can’t see them, but they’re talking and laughing together in a way they never did in the waking world. There’s no barked orders, no quiet submission. And Mom, Mom's there, sitting on his ratty couch that he scooped off a street corner, going over law school pamphlets, telling Sam how she wishes he would apply to Yale, he’s so smart, surely they’d see that? Sam always smiles at her in the dream, not saying much, just happy to absorb this, this feeling of family, of love and pride and care.

He doesn’t dream about her like that anymore. He’s had nightmares, sure — ones where Mary looks at him and says, “I did it for you” desperately, like that makes it all better. Nightmares, but no good dreams.

Sam tells himself it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need a mother. He has a real family now, and he watched it grow from practically nothing. He has Dean, always has and always will, and now they’ve got Cas, and there’s something between him and Eileen that Sam wants to explore.

Sam's good at telling himself lies — _I’ll take the demon blood because it’s the right thing to do, I’m not afraid of Lucifer, I don’t miss Jess anymore_ — but he still turns his phone back on before he goes to sleep.

No new messages.

///

It’s Eileen who helps him reach the tipping point.

“I saw your mom,” she tells him one day over Skype, both speaking and signing the words. Sam's been signing back at her — it gets easier every time they talk — but he wasn't expecting that.

He trips over his words. “What? I... How?”

Eileen shrugs and smiles sort of sheepishly.

“She reached out through the network. I was going to tell you first, but then she wanted to talk right away and...” She shrugs. “I’d rather her bullshit me than you.”

That’s the kind of thing that would normally make him smile, to know that Eileen cares enough about him to try and help him carry his burdens. But Mary is another matter altogether.

“What did she say?” Sam asks, and he can’t stop his voice from trembling. Eileen looks at him with sympathy.

 _“We don’t have to talk about her if you’re not ready,”_ she signs slowly. _“It can wait.”_

No, no it can’t.

 _“Tell me,”_ he signs back.

So Eileen explains how Mary contacted her under the pretense of needing help on a case. Turns out she’s still in Kansas, puttering around Topeka and taking on minor cases. She told Eileen she’s not working for the British Men of Letter anymore. “Never again,” Mary said. “They hurt my family.”

All Sam can think is _so did you._

“She didn’t ask me to contact you,” Eileen says. “I think she just wanted to make sure you were doing okay, or maybe she hoped I would mention her to you.”

Sam looks away from the camera, jaw tense. _“Well, you did,”_ he signs. He’s not mad at her for taking the call, not really. He’s mad at his mother for putting Eileen in this situation, for putting all of them in a position where they have to choose sides. Sam’s mad at God for drifting down and then back up and away again without ever really saying anything to him, not even a “sorry I didn’t do more to help you stop the apocalypse the first time; thanks for taking one for the team, champ.” He’s mad at Amara, who terrified and violated Dean for a year and then left behind a gift that now feels like a curse. But Sam’s not sure how to articulate all of that. He’s good at prodding other people to talk about their feelings. He’s not so good at sharing his own.

“Sam.” Eileen always says his name so gently. He remembers Jess saying his name like that, thinks of every time Cas says “Dean” in that reverent tone of voice, and it makes his chest ache. He could love this woman someday. He’s not going to begrudge her a short, mostly professional conversation with his estranged mother. “We can talk about something else.”

He looks back at the screen. She’s smiling at him, a closed-mouth, concern-lined smile, but it still makes some of that anger he’s holding onto shake loose. Maybe if he looked up right now he could watch it float away, undone by this disarming woman who’s kept him on his toes since they first met.

“Okay,” he says, signing along with his words. “Let’s talk about something else.”

And they do. They talk about when they can see each other next (a week and three days from now), whether _American Horror Story_ is worth watching (Sam is a no, because he lives that life, thanks, but Eileen loves it, says it’s ridiculous and over-the-top in the best way), what Sam should eat for dinner (cereal, while he keeps talking to her), what their weirdest case was (when Sam says “Dean could talk to animals” he wins handily). It’s pointless and pleasant and right before they end the call she signs, _“I miss you”_ and he wants to get in one of the bunker’s old clunkers and drive to her right away. Instead he signs, _“I miss you, too.”_

Sam sits there for a while, long past when his laptop screen goes black, thinking about Eileen. Then his thoughts drift to the beginning of their conversation. Before he can really think it over he’s thumbing through the contacts list on his phone until he reaches “Mary Winchester.”

If she were a normal mother, like the one from his dreams, and he were a normal son, like the one he always wanted to be, he would hit call. He would tell her about the girl he thinks he’s falling in love with and why that terrifies him, only if they were normal he would just be scared of commitment, not scared of watching her die on some hunt. He would tell Mary pointless things about his day, like how he found this great podcast about the Civil War or how he had to watch Dean make out with Cas for like ten seconds before they realized he was there and that he too needed to use their very communal restroom. She’d probably laugh.

Sam wants it. He wants to feel normal for once, to have a mother who can give him advice, who will laugh with him and talk to him, no agenda, no lies. He wants it so, so badly, his thumb hovering over the screen indecisively. It would be so easy to press the button that could connect them.

Dean calls before Sam can decide anything, and that takes care of that.

///

It starts with texting.

One day Sam sends out a “Just checking in — are you doing okay?” before he can think better of it.

He gets back a “Hi Sam! I’m all right. I’m in Topeka. I found a part-time job, actually.”

His fingers twitch, dying to type out so many questions, like “what kind of job?” or “why are you staying in one place?” He’s pretty sure he knows the answer to that last one.

Dean walks into his room before Sam can respond, and he fumbles to put his phone out of sight. Dean just raises an eyebrow.

“Sexting?” he asks, leering.

“Haven’t you ever heard of knocking?” Sam snaps back, maybe a little more viciously than he intended, because Dean throws up his hands in mock surrender.

“Jeez! Sorry, princess. Don’t get your panties in a bunch. I just wanted to know if you’d rather order a pizza or have burgers.”

Sam, slightly chagrined, says, “Burgers,” not necessarily because he wants them, but because he knows Dean loves to cook for him and Cas.

Sure enough, Dean smiles wide. “Great,” he says. ”Tell Eileen I said hey.” Then he’s off, whistling down the hall. Sam smiles faintly. Dean’s been stupidly happy lately, probably because Sam and Cas are both safely in the bunker where he can take care of them, feeding them and making them do their laundry and watching TV with all of them piled in Sam’s bed. 

Sam pulls his phone out from where he shoved it under his covers. His mom texted him again. “Are YOU doing okay?” 

He feels strangely guilty when he responds, “As okay as ever,” because the person who raised him, the person who really does love him unconditionally, just took off down the hall. Dean’s the closest thing Sam’s ever had to a real parent, and it feels like a betrayal when Mary asks, “Do you want to talk? I could call” and Sam tells her to wait until after eleven, when he’s sure his brother will be asleep.

///

It’s really an unfortunate coincidence that Cas decides to sneak off somewhere the same day Sam’s scheduled to meet with Mary in person for the first time in months. It means Dean's already strung-out and suspicious when Sam makes up some terrible excuse about a soil exhibit before ducking out of the kitchen and practically running to the garage. He’d planned to take the Impala, but, still mentally kicking himself for saying "soil exhibition," he gets behind the wheel of an old Rolls Royce instead. Cas’s truck is already gone.

Sam spends most of the three-hour drive listening to the oldies station the radio seems to be stuck on and jiggling his left leg nervously, eyes occasionally darting to his phone in the passenger seat. Dean hasn’t tried to contact him. Sam almost calls Cas, but “Hey, we can’t both go do shit behind Dean’s back at the same time” is not a conversation he really wants to have right now.

Mary asked him to meet her at a hole-in-the-wall diner just off of I-70, somewhere between Topeka and Junction City. He’s a little surprised to see her right when he walks in, manning the hostess stand, a pen tucked behind her ear as she evaluates the seating chart.

“Mom?” If his voice comes out somewhat strangled who could blame him? Sam hasn’t seen his mother in months, and the last time they were face to face she was covered in blood, not her own, tears streaming down her face as Dean essentially disowned her. Sam didn’t say anything to stop it.

Mary looks up at him and her hostess smile falls before she plasters on a cheery, fake grin that looks more like a grimace of pain than any semblance of excitement.

“Hey, Sam,” she says. He awkwardly walks behind the stand to her, and she awkwardly pulls him into a brief hug. “Would you want to wait over there?” Mary gestures to a booth tucked into a back corner, between the jukebox and what looks like the door to the kitchen. “You’re a little early. My shift ends in five minutes.”

He just nods, brushing by her to the booth, where he sits until she’s done, his eyes following her as she works instead of reading menu items. At least when she comes to the table he’ll have the excuse of needing to pick a meal and won’t have to look at her directly for too long.

When Mary takes a seat across from him she’s still smiling, but this time it’s a little softer, a little more genuine.

“So,” she says, holding out her hands, “you had some things you wanted to talk to me about?”

Well, he did. Sam even has a list tucked into his jacket pocket, things he needs to get off his chest if this is ever going to work — he wants to talk about Dean, about Cas, about Jess and Eileen and all the women in between them, about being raised a hunter, about Lucifer and Heaven and Hell — but he thought they’d at least eat first, make small talk like regular people. But Mary is watching him with almost eager eyes, and instead of saying “Can I order a salad first?” Sam says, “The first thing you need to know is that Dad was a terrible father.”

Mary blinks, taken aback. “I —” she starts to say, then finishes, “What?” Her voice shakes.

Sam leans forward, menu pushed aside and forgotten.

“We didn’t tell you because, I don’t know, I thought it would be too much to handle and Dean just doesn’t talk about it,” he says, absent-mindedly grabbing his paper napkin roll and unspooling it so he’ll have something to do with his hands. “But that’s why I’m here.”

“You’re here to tell me John was a terrible father?”

“No,” Sam says, frustrated. He should have planned this out more. He shouldn’t have rushed in with the heart choice. “I’m here because I didn’t have a good relationship with Dad, and I want us to be different. I _need_ this to be different.”

Mary’s leaning back against the cracked vinyl booth, looking a little shell-shocked. “Okay,” she says, quietly. “Okay. Tell me everything.”

Sam tears tiny holes in the paper napkin as he says, “He went crazy when you died. He found out about the supernatural world and just... lost it. He spent our entire lives chasing Azazel, the demon who killed you. He trained us to start hunting as children. He’d go on benders and terrify the shit out of us, then leave us alone for weeks at a time, which was almost more terrifying, because we knew what was out there in the dark. Dean raised me, not Dad, and when Dad died the last thing he told Dean was that he might have to kill me because of the demon blood Azazel gave me.” 

He takes a deep, shaky breath. Mary sits silently, eyes watery. 

“I still don’t know how I feel about him,” Sam says. “I can’t — He saved our lives, you know? If he hadn’t forced us into hunting we never would have been prepared to do what we had to do in order to save the world.” 

He pauses when a waitress comes to the table, but Mary waves her away with a strangled, “Not right now, Gina.” Sam watches the other woman go, then starts up again, not looking at his mother. 

“But he also wrecked our lives. He gave Dean this inferiority complex that’s about the size of the Grand Canyon, made him feel like he was never good enough or smart enough. There were a few times when Dean was literally dying and Dad didn’t act like he gave a shit, and... Dean was probably the most scared of Dad. He’d hardly ever cross him unless Dad turned on me. He still talks about him like a solider talking about a commanding officer, not a son talking about his father.”

Mary reaches out across the table and takes one of Sam’s hands, stopping its path of destruction across the napkin. Both their hands are shaking. “And what did he do to you?” she asks quietly, like she’s afraid of the answer and if she asks the question soft enough maybe she can hide from the truth. 

Sam looks up at her. She stares back at him, broken yet unflinching.

“He kept me at arm’s length. He never trusted me, but he never told me why. He knew Azazel did something to me, but he kept it a secret. If he belittled Dean, he ostracized me.” 

He rips a huge chunk off the napkin with one hand. 

“Anything that was important to me — school, friends, a normal existence — Dad kept me as apart from it as he could. The only good thing he allowed me to have was Dean, and that was because he needed Dean to watch over me since he was too damn afraid of me to do it himself. When I told him I got into Stanford he told me if I left I could never come back, and he held Dean over my head — ‘If you go, you’re dead to me and your brother,’ that’s what he said to me — and I never forgave him for that, for making that rift between us. Even after he died, even when I miss him, I don’t know if I can forgive him for any of it. The farther away it all gets, the more I wonder why I didn’t see so clearly then that I didn’t need his approval or his affection.” 

Sam stops to run a hand down his face. Mary is still holding the other one. 

“There’s more. He did more shit to Dean that Dean won’t even tell me about, but I just know. It took me forever to figure it out, that Dad probably pushed him around a few times, and I wish, god, I wish I had known sooner. Maybe I could have stopped it. And Dean’s not going to tell you any of this, because part of him will always worship Dad, even though that part shrinks every year, but someone had to tell you. You need to know what he was like.”

Sam’s not sure when he started crying. He looks down at the Formica tabletop and tries to remember where he was going with this. Across the diner a couple is laughing loudly, and someone’s just dropped something big in the kitchen. The world moves on.

“I know that’s not how you remember him,” Sam says finally. “But that’s how we knew him. And I think you need to understand that to understand us. I did love him, I did. At least I think I did. But he was fucked up, Mom, he was so fucked up.”

He looks up and sees that Mary is crying, too, tears pooling in her eyes and blurring her mascara. He reaches out with his free hand to take her other hand, and she squeezes once they’re clasped together. It doesn’t feel good, not exactly, but it feels like progress.

///

“I didn’t know what they were going to do to Cas,” Mary confides in him one day, after several visits and several lies to Dean. She’s in between shifts at the diner, smoking a cigarette on the curb outside while Sam sits next to her.

“It’s a terrible habit,” she admitted before lighting up. “But back in the ‘70s and ‘80s it felt like everybody was doing it.”

Sam just nodded and made sure to sit upwind from the smoke.

She holds the cigarette a while before speaking, idly watching cars pass by on the highway. Her clenched jaw gives away her nerves.

“We fought some angels in Bismarck,” she says eventually. “The Men of Letters said they’d been feeding on human souls, and they were right. There were two of them, and four victims we couldn’t save.”

“Grigori,” Sam says. He remembers Amelia Novak, pale and thin, dying in her daughter’s arms.

“Yes, but I didn’t know that at the time. We cornered one of the angels, and he kept talking about how all humans are good for is providing energy.” Mary takes another drag off her cigarette. “Then he talked about Castiel. How he’d found his own permanent residence with two of the most powerful souls in the universe, how smart that made him.”

“He was playing you.”

Mary nods, eyes still on the highway. “I know. That’s what I thought then, too. But Ketch thought differently.”

Sam scoffs.

“Of course he did.”

Mary turns to him and looks over his face, like she’s committing Sam to memory, just in case what she says next pushes him away again. She does that a lot.

“He kept asking me, ‘What if that is what the angel’s doing? What if he’s using them?’ And Sam, I just —” She shakes her head. “I just stated to doubt myself, doubt Castiel. But I didn’t want him to get hurt.”

Sam kicks at some loose gravel under his boot. Dean should be here. Dean needs to hear this.

“When I asked Castiel to come to the headquarters, it was only supposed to be me who interrogated him. They wanted me to ask him questions about how his grace works and what his angel blade is made of, but I just wanted to talk to him about his relationship with you two in an environment I could control.”

“Then you let them torture him,” Sam says, forcing the words out as blandly as possible, because that’s the part he doesn’t understand. That’s the part Dean can’t forgive. Mary didn’t care if Cas got hurt, John didn’t care if Dean got hurt. Maybe his parents really did belong together. Maybe all Winchesters are slightly sociopathic.

“I didn’t know,” she says, quiet but insistent. She stomps out the cigarette. “As soon as I found out Ketch was locked in alone with him, I called Dean.”

That wasn't a fun call to be on the other end of. Sam had watched Dean pace, shouting into the phone, eyes wild and movements sharp. That was it, that moment — the beginning of the end of their relationship with their mother.

“I don’t know that Dean will accept that,” he tells her.

Mary nods, biting her lip. Then she asks, “Will you?”

He doesn’t know the right answer, which frustrates him. Sam has always prided himself on being the smartest one in the room, the brains of the operation in matters both informational and emotional. Mary throws him off.

“I know it’s no excuse,” she says when he doesn’t respond, “but I wanted to keep you safe; I had to keep both of you safe. It’s all my fault, all of this. What happened with Castiel, yes, but also what happened to you, Sam. I didn’t know it, but I —” She puts her head in her hands and her shoulders start to shake, and Sam can’t help it, he places a hand on her back, rubbing in soothing circles. “I practically sold you to Azazel to save your father. I had to make it up to you, and instead I did everything wrong.”

They sit like that for a while, Mary’s face buried in her bent knees, Sam rubbing her back and ignoring the curious looks of customers who file in and out of the diner. Mary’s phone beeps to signify her shift starting, and she finally looks up and swipes at her eyes.

“Do you think he’d let me apologize?” she asks once they’re standing, as Sam helps her gather her coat and purse from the ground, reaching to grab a stray tube of lip gloss that tumbled out of her coat pocket. 

Sam starts to shake his head no, because Dean’s not ready for that, not yet, and he hasn’t figured out a way to tell him about his meetings with Mary. Like she read his mind, his mother says, “Not Dean. Cas. I want to apologize to Castiel.”

 _Oh._ That’s actually pretty perfect. While Sam’s been obsessing over how to break it to Dean that he’s been seeing Mary, Cas has been sneaking around, too, doing God knows what. Maybe they could help each other do damage control. A twinge of shame snakes it’s way through Sam’s chest at the thought. Dean deserves better than this, than lies from the people that he loves, but Sam made his decisions and it’s too late to go back on them now. It’s too late to go back on his mom now.

“I’ll ask him,” he says, knowing Cas will say yes. Dean’s the one holding a grudge so tightly he won’t let even Cas talk him out of it.

Mary smiles, her eyes crinkling at the edges in a way that reminds Sam of his brother’s smile when he’s truly happy. They share more of a resemblance with each other than they could possibly know.

“Thanks, Sam.” She never calls him Sammy, even though Dean told him once that she originally bestowed the nickname upon him. It reminds him that this Mary, tired and worn and back from the dead, is for all intents and purposes still a stranger to her own sons. “Tell Eileen I said hi, okay?”

He nods. Eileen is the only one who knows about these secret meetings. Maybe she could help him decide how to tell Cas, too. Bringing more people in on his deception is not the best move, but Sam's a Winchester. They do what they have to do for family, always.

///

The drive back to the motel after meeting Mary in the field is tense, silent except for Ellen Weatherby’s hitching sobs. Eileen is half-holding the older woman in the backseat, whispering words of comfort Sam can barely hear over the rush of wind as they barrel down the highway, windows rolled down. Cas sits on the other side of Ellen, watching the back of Dean’s head with a level of concentration most people reserve for thinking about moral relativism. Dean's not speaking to any of them, hands clenching the wheel so tight his knuckles are turning white, eyes on the road and mouth drawn in a thin line.

They’ve fucked up. Or, more accurately, Sam’s fucked up.

His phone vibrates in his jacket pocket, but he doesn’t dare try to answer it or even look to see who’s calling. It has to be Mary. 

Sam and Cas wait in the car by silent, mutual agreement while Dean and Eileen walk Ellen to her front door. Sam watches as Gerald Weatherby answers Dean’s brusque knock, takes in the shocked look on the man’s face when his wife falls into his arms. He must ask Dean and Eileen to come in, because they all four disappear into the house without so much as a backward glance toward the car.

“It will be all right, Sam,” Cas says comfortingly in that soft, low burr of his. 

Sam looks through the rearview mirror at his friend.

“He’s pissed,” he says.

Cas nods, then sighs heavily.

“We should have told him sooner.” He makes an attempt at a wry smile that falls totally flat, but Sam tries his best to return it anyway. “But you're right, he would have tried to stop you. Dean can be....”

“Judgmental? Overbearing?” Sam provides.

“I was going to say extremely protective.”

Sam lets his head flop against the back of his seat, defeated.

“Yeah, that too. I guess we're both in similar boats, here.” He turns slightly so he can see Cas out of the corner of his eye. “Cas, I needed to talk to her. I needed to know _why._ I needed to know her.”

“I know,” Cas says kindly. “I understand.” Sam thinks, _no, you really don’t_ and then immediately feels guilty because of course Cas probably does understand in a way. He wanted to talk to Chuck, too, for a long time, only to be disappointed by reality. 

Dean and Eileen return after a short time in the Weatherby house. 

“They’ll be okay,” Eileen says, and Sam doesn’t call her on the obvious lie. A possession is not something you slip off like an old coat. It haunts you, day and night, wrapping itself around you at the worst possible moments, making you wonder if anything you feel is real, if you’re even you anymore. He knows from experience.

Once they’re back at the motel Eileen excuses herself to take a shower, giving Sam a small, pained smile for luck as she goes. Dean turns to Cas and says, “Give us a minute.” Cas looks at Sam for confirmation, and Sam nods slightly, feeling like a kid whose parent is about to lecture him as soon as his friends are out of the room. As Cas walks away Dean calls out to him, “Don’t think you’re off the hook, either!”

Then he looks at Sam, all his disappointment and heartache written across his face. Dean’s always worn his heart on his very thin sleeves, ever since they were kids, even when it would get him hurt, even when it made their dad angry. “Real boys don’t cry” was one of John Winchester’s favorite refrains, and Sam followed it better than Dean ever did.

Oddly enough, Sam feels like crying now when Dean asks in a small voice, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Sam shifts uncomfortably. “You know why.”

“God, Sam, I really don’t.” Dean’s eyes are watering, too. “After what she did, I thought we were in agreement that —”

“We weren’t,” Sam snaps, rubbing at his own wet eyes, defensive. “You never asked for my opinion, you never do.”

“She could have gotten Cas killed!”

That’s the crux of the matter, but that isn’t all of it.

“If you had listened to her, you would know the whole story, Dean. But you don’t listen! You never gave her a chance. From the second she decided to leave the bunker you thought the worst of her. You chose to believe that she didn’t care about us. You chose to believe she hurt Cas on purpose.”

Dean turns away, shaking his head. “You’ve gotta be kidding me...”

“I wanted to hear her out, Dean. That’s it. I just wanted to hear her side. She’s our mother, not our enemy!”

“She ain’t family,” Dean says. “Cas is.”

“Damn it, Dean, I know Cas is family! I love him, too, okay? You don’t have a monopoly on him just because you two are fucking!” 

Sam sees Dean’s fist clench and he throws his hands up. Too far, right. 

“But Mom is family to me,” he continues, softer. “I want her to be family to you. But you, you always do this. You put people on pedestals and when they show the first sign of a weakness or they make a bad decision you yank it out from under them and then act like it’s their fault when they fall to the ground. She’s not Mother Mary, perfect pie baker and loving housewife, she’s just... a Winchester.”

Sam sighs. Dean looks away from him, off toward the door of his and Cas’s room, and Sam's heart hurts for his brother, whose worst nightmare is to lose the two people he can’t live without — Sam and Cas.

“She made the wrong call. She had suspicions she should have taken to us. But she didn’t know what Ketch was going to do. She didn’t even want Ketch in the same room with him.”

Dean turns back to him, face red and blotchy, and god, Sam feels guilty. Not for speaking to Mary, but for keeping it from Dean for so long.

“Cas knew?”

“He talked to her, just one time over the phone. She explained everything to him and apologized, profusely. He accepted. Just ask him, he’ll tell you anything.”

His brother laughs bitterly.

“Apparently not.” 

"Dean, I'm —" Sam starts, then stops. "I am sorry for not telling you sooner. But you can't keep me from her. You can't keep trying to make my decisions for me."

Dean just laughs again, as ugly as the first time.

"Right," he says, "all right then. Don't worry, I'll just leave you two to your mother-son bonding."

Sam watches Dean walk back across the parking lot to his room, pulling open the door forcefully and then slamming it shut behind him. He feels for Cas right about now, he really does.

Eileen's likely waiting for him in their room, and Sam wants to go to her, to take comfort in her soothing words and soft body, but there’s something else he has to do first. 

He pulls out his phone and calls his mother.


	3. Castiel

It’s Mary who pulls him out of the interrogation room.

At this point, Cas isn’t sure how long he’s been here, shackled to a chair in white-walled room deep within the British Men of Letters’ headquarters. Ketch left some time ago, taking his warded brass knuckles with him. The left side of Cas’s face still aches from the last hit the other man landed.

He’s not sure why he’s here, either. He’s gathered that this branch of the Men of Letters detests anything non-human, so perhaps it was only a matter of time before they turned on him. He hadn’t expected them to use Mary to get him here, but, then again, this is not the first time he's been blindsided by someone’s deceptive kindness.

What upsets him most is not the blood pouring from the cuts on his cheeks and from his broken nose, or the way the warded shackles are cracking the skin on his wrists, or even the grace Ketch stole from him, jabbing a needle into his neck and drawing out more and more, even when Cas begged him to stop. No, what upsets him most is that Dean isn’t going to know what happened to him. When Ketch finally gets bored and decides to take an angel blade to Cas's stomach there will be no one to tell Dean that Cas didn’t choose to leave him this time.

When Cas sees Mary he first wonders if she’s a hallucination, some strange fever dream his wounded grace concocted, a rescuer where there is none. But then she shoots the chain that connects his shackles to the floor and the sound echoes throughout the room, abrupt and violent, and Cas knows she's real.

She pulls him to his feet before he can ask her why she’s here, why she came back for him. Mary tucks one of her arms under his, awkwardly supporting his weight as they stumble out of the room. His hands are still bound, the sigils still rubbing his skin raw, and his vision swims. He nearly collapses on her halfway down the hall, but she manages to catch him before he hits the ground. His face smashes into her stomach, smearing blood across her white shirt.

“Get up, Castiel,” Mary says, and her voice sounds so far away but her hands are right there, pulling him to his feet. “Come on, soldier.”

  
  


That’s an order he’s heard before. His feet start to obey it before his head can protest. Cas follows her blindly through the Men of Letters headquarters as she twists and turns through hallways and down stairwells, narrowly avoiding detection. When the alarms start to blare he hears Mary say “Damn it!” before she turns to him, reaching out to cup his face with her free hand.

“We have to run now, Cas! Now!”

Cas isn’t sure how they make it out of the building, only that they do. And then Dean's suddenly there, running for them while gunshots ring out behind their backs. An answering volley of fire comes from the Impala, where Sam waits, shotgun in hand. Mary and Dean both carry Cas to the car, and then they’re in and Dean yells, “Go! Go!” and Cas puts his head in his friend’s lap and drifts off.

///

Mary isn’t in the bunker when Cas wakes up. 

Dean is. He’s next to Cas’s bed in one of the library chairs, asleep in what looks like a very uncomfortable position, limbs hanging off the armrests, head back, mouth open and drooling. He is the most wonderful sight Cas has ever seen, and he finds himself content to stare, not bothering to wake Dean.

The lamp on the desk next to his bed is still on, so Cas holds up his hands, turning them over in the light and studying the open wounds on his wrists left by the handcuffs Ketch placed on him. They should be closed by now, his skin stitched back together like nothing ever tore it apart. He puts his hands back down and looks at Dean, still sleeping, one eye twitching as he dreams. Cas waits for what feels like forever before he can’t take it anymore, the silence in his head and the voice inside that wants to scream _where is your grace?!_ He reaches over and pats Dean’s arm.

Dean startles awake, tumbling out of the chair and landing on the floor with a thud.

“Dean?” Cas asks, concerned. He leans over the edge of the bed, wincing at the pain the movement causes. Everything aches.

“Cas?” Dean sits up on his knees next to the bed before Cas can say anything else. “Hey, buddy. How ya feelin’?”

He hopes the grimace he makes conveys his sentiments adequately.

“Yeah,” Dean says, face scrunching in sympathy. “Not so good, huh? You’ve been out for a whole day, man. I was really starting to freak out here.” Dean rubs the back of his neck self-consciously, likely embarrassed to admit how worried he felt. Cas reaches out for him again, ignoring the pain to touch his face softly.

“Cas?” Dean asks, low and quiet.

There are many things Cas should say here and now. _I missed you, I only thought of you when I was sure I was going to die, I’m so happy you came for me, I love you and I won’t hide it anymore._ Instead he strokes Dean’s cheek, and Dean leans into his hand, eyes falling closed. He knows it’s enough when Dean says, “Yeah, Cas. Me too.”

///

Dean kisses him three days later. 

His grace is still pathetically weak so his entire head hurts when Dean gently tips his chin upward, but Cas doesn’t notice the pain for long. Dean is careful, touching his lips to Cas’s so softly he almost doesn’t feel it. It’s not how he expected this to happen, the few times he allowed himself to imagine he and Dean coming together. Cas always thought it would happen in an almost violent manner, after a botched hunt or a heated argument.

This is much better. 

When Dean leans back and asks, “Was that okay?” Cas just smiles.

“Of course.”

Dean doesn’t want to hurt him so they don’t kiss anymore, but he crawls into bed next to Cas and silently sets up Netflix on the laptop he borrowed from Sam. They lay there for hours, cycling through the end of season two of _Orange is the New Black_ and the first few episodes of _Arrow_ , which Dean claims to hate because “Stephen Amell is overrated.” Cas leans his head against Dean’s shoulder, careful to keep pressure off the worst of his bruises, and Dean’s hand brushes along his hip, carefully avoiding the places where Ketch sliced at his skin with the angel blade. It’s nice and calm. It’s everything Cas wanted it to be. 

Sam comes in eventually and makes Dean leave to eat and take a shower.

“He’s been here for days,” Sam says, and Cas nods because he’s woken enough times to the sight of Dean lying rumpled in the chair next to his bed to tell that Dean never really leaves his side. “Are you healing okay?”

“No,” he says. “Well, not like I should be. I’m healing like a human would.”

Sam doesn’t press the matter, simply nodding before pulling his chair around so he can see the screen better. Cas switches over to a nature documentary about penguins and they watch in silence for several minutes before he finally asks the question he’s been wanting an answer to for days.

“Where’s your mother?”

Cas watches Sam’s face, carefully blank in the light of the screen. His friend swallows hard, the only tell that gives him away.

“Dean kicked her out.”

“Oh,” Cas says. He thinks of Mary, asking him to meet her at the Brits' headquarters under false pretenses but then pulling him to safety before Ketch could land the killing blow. She put him in danger and then saved his life. He doesn’t know how to feel about any of it.

“Dean told her that after what she let them do to you, he never wants to see her again.” Sam stares at the wall, eyes unfocused. “He kept calling her Mary.”

Cas reaches out a hand to place on his friend’s arm, a gesture of comfort, solidarity perhaps. He didn’t want Dean to force Mary out, either. Sam doesn’t look at him, but a corner of his mouth quirks up in a small, broken smile.

“I can talk to him,” Cas says.

“No, he was right.” Sam doesn’t sound so sure. “Don’t worry about it, Cas. You need to focus on getting better, or Dean’s only going to get worse.” 

He says that in a joking tone, but Cas hears it for what it is — a plea to change the subject.

///

It quickly becomes apparent that Cas’s leftover grace is all but useless.

He’s unsure how much Ketch stole from him, but his tediously slow healing process reveals how weak he is now. He can’t even summon a small spark to repair the gash across his cheekbone.

“I like it,” Dean says, all false cheer. “It looks gnarly, man. Chicks dig scars.”

Cas raises an eyebrow at him and Dean coughs awkwardly.

“I, uh, I dig scars, too.”

This is something he’ll have to get used to, Cas supposes. Dean makes jokes when he feels uncomfortable, puts off serious subjects by forcing wide smiles. Whether he’s upset that Cas is hurt or unsure how to deal with their newly changed relationship, Cas will be there for him when he’s ready to talk about his fears in an open manner. If that day ever comes.

It would be hypocritical for Cas to be upset with Dean in any case. He’s hiding his own fear, this insidious thought that _I am not an angel anymore, I am not useful to you anymore._ He hasn’t told Dean about Ketch siphoning his grace away, hasn’t mentioned the empty spaces in his body where it used to wind its way around his primary organs, nestled between his lungs, riding his beating heart, wrapping protectively around his brain. There’s still some there, but it doesn’t feel right. It aches.

Cas doesn’t want Dean to worry more than he already is. While Cas slowly heals from his encounter with Ketch he distracts himself and Dean by telling stories of battles with demons and rogue angels, battles where he gained far worse scars. Dean seems spellbound by these stories, a pleasant bonus.

There’s a particular tale he especially enjoys, one he asks Cas to repeat one day after they’ve finished season one of _Arrow_ and Cas has deduced that Dean feels slightly threatened by Oliver Queen’s dashing appearance.

“I just said he’s attractive, Dean,” Cas says, closing Sam’s laptop and setting it aside. They’ve moved into Dean’s bedroom permanently, a progression Sam simply rolled his eyes at, muttering, “Finally” under his breath as Dean carried Cas’s few possessions to his closet. 

“Yeah, but like, only if you’re into the guyliner look.”

“Guyliner?” Cas is flummoxed. 

“Jeez, never mind.” Dean scoots down the bed so he’s lying partially in Cas’s lap. The cuts along his legs have almost completely healed, scarring over, so it’s a position Dean often takes, knowing just the right places to touch Cas, places that won’t cause him any pain. 

“He’s not more attractive than you, if that’s what’s upsetting you.” Cas feels fairly certain that hits the heart of the matter. “You’re by far the most beautiful human in all of creation. The most beautiful _anything_ in all of creation, actually, and I say this as someone who watched over earth for thousands of years.”

Dean just scoffs, but his lips twitch into a pleased half smile.

“You sure know how to make a girl blush, man,” he says, voice loaded with sarcasm that Cas chooses to ignore. Dean's also incapable of accepting compliments.

Cas leans back against the pillows, propped up against the headboard, running his fingers through Dean’s short hair. They sit in comfortable silence for a while before Dean says, “Hey, speaking of watching creation... You should tell me that story about the battle for Eve again.”

The corner of Cas’s lips quirks up involuntarily.

“I don’t know, Dean. I was thinking tonight I could tell you the story of how the Enochian lettering system was invented.”

Dean buries his face in Cas’s thigh and groans, and Cas shifts a little because Dean doesn’t mean anything by it but he’s so close to Cas’s cock and they haven’t done anything more than gently kiss, just every once in a while, so far. Cas isn’t sure if Dean’s ready for more. 

They don’t really talk about it, this shift in their relationship. It’s monumental, it’s groundbreaking, it’s cosmic; this change from longing to reciprocation, but neither of them seem to know how to put it into words. It just is. They didn’t used to share a bed, but now they do; they didn’t used to press soft, sweet kisses to each other’s lips, but now they do; they didn’t used to hold hands, lying across from each other at night, but now they do. 

They didn’t used to talk about their unspoken feelings for each, but that they still don’t do.

“Don’t do that to me.” Dean rolls back over, and Cas sighs in relief. Dean looks up at him, eyes wide and pleading. It’s not as widely effective as Sam’s “puppy face,” as Dean calls it, and yet it's widely known among all circles in Heaven, Hell and Purgatory that Castiel, former angel of the Lord, is incredibly weak for Dean Winchester, stubborn human. 

“All right.” He smiles beatifically. “Your Bible leaves out several important battles between the Heavenly Host and the forces of Hell, but one of the most glaring omissions is the battle for Eve’s soul...”

Cas never considered himself a particularly adept storyteller before Dean started asking about his history, and he still doesn’t possess the skill of some of his angelic kin. He was a warrior, not a scribe. And yet, it’s comforting to remember his more exciting exploits, and far more comforting still to know that Dean enjoys hearing these stories.

He tells Dean the tale of Eve that only battle-trained angels and a few ancient demons would remember. How the mother of humanity first had only two sons, Cain and Abel, whom she loved dearly. How she wept when Cain killed Abel, how she and Adam tried uselessly for another child, someone to love enough to ease their loss. How Eve stood at the first crossroads and asked Hell for help when Heaven wouldn’t answer. How Cain was the demon who stood before her. First she asked her eldest son to return his younger brother to her, but Cain refused.

“Why?” Eve asked, a plea as much as a question.

“You and Father helped bring the devil into the world,” Cain told her. “Did you think he wouldn’t want more from you? I saved Abel from Lucifer when you could not. I won’t bring him back to be claimed again.”

Heart hardened, Eve asked Cain for another son. “I wish to replace you,” she said, wanting to spite him, not fully comprehending the sacrifice he’d made for his brother.

Cain told her another deal with the devil would not be without price, and Eve insisted that this time she, and she alone, would bear the burden of Hell’s wrath when it came due. Cain kissed his mother on the forehead, promising to return for her in ten years time.

“The first demon deal,” Dean says at this point, although he’s heard this one several times, and Cas reads the sympathy in his eyes, both for Eve and for Cain.

“Eve had her son,” Cas says softly. “Seth, and more children besides. She never spoke of her deal to Adam. She had lost much, and she didn’t truly believe Cain would take more from her. But he came back in ten years for her soul.”

“And Heaven decided they weren’t gonna take that shit.”

Cas grins at Dean’s irreverence. “They’d already lost Cain, a major blow. The angels were in a panic at the thought of Hell sinking its claws into the mother of humanity. This was at a time when the Host still believed they should care for the humans, place our Father's last creations above all else. They — well, we — decided that the terms of Eve’s agreement with Cain were unclear, and so we felt justified in retrieving her soul for Heaven.” 

Cas can almost picture it — the first human soul he ever saw. It shone brilliantly, so powerful, even though it was cracked and worn, marked by Hell. All the angels were astonished. They’d had no idea how much of God’s own grace had been given to the humans until that moment.

“But then Hell came,” Cas says, stroking Dean’s hair. “At the time, all demons except Cain and Lilith were fallen angels. Lucifer had just been banished to the cage, and his minions had not yet discovered what he already knew — that human souls are the greatest source of energy in the universe. Until then, there had been no deals except the one between Cain and Eve. But as soon as they saw Eve’s soul, they knew what it was worth, what they could warp it into — something like Lilith, like Cain. A new, insidious breed of evil."

“It was not a long battle. I myself didn’t see much action.” Dean scoffs at that, and Cas rolls his eyes fondly. “Well, all right, I took down several of the fallen ones. But Mammon — he was especially powerful — took his blade to my wings. It was a deep cut, one I might not have survived if it weren’t for Anna. She swept in and helped me fend him off, and we flew away. It never fully healed, though. In my angelic form, on the uppermost wing on my right side, there’s a scar that extends from what you would call the humerus bone all the way to the radius.” He traces a finger through the air, imagining the scar he used to know by heart.

“Bet it’s pretty awesome,” Dean says.

“Chicks would probably dig it,” Cas responds, and Dean laughs. He pauses for a moment. “And Eve — the angels couldn’t keep hold of her soul, but neither could the demons. It was lost in the battle. It was much, much later when we realized that she’d slipped through the cracks of the dimensions into Purgatory. There the mother of humanity became the mother of monsters. Her love for her children disintegrated into something... markedly unholy.”

Dean sits silently, as he often does after this story. Cas believes he knows why Dean always asks to hear it, but, like with so many things, he’s waiting for Dean to speak for himself.

But instead of commenting on the familiar desperation of demon deals or the tragedy of a mother who unintentionally ruined the lives of her sons, Dean says, “Why couldn’t you heal it? Your injury?”

It’s not the question Cas expected.

“Uh, well,” he says, trying and failing to think of how to describe the complex mechanics of grace to a being who lives on a singular plane. “Sometimes the injury is simply too great.”

Dean just looks at him, and Cas looks back, wondering at the pain in Dean’s eyes.

“So is the injury too great now?”

 _Oh._ Of course Dean is worried about his agonizingly slow healing process. Cas hasn’t been able to help with hunts, he can’t heal the Winchester's injuries or his own. He’s all but useless.

“Dean,” he says, searching for the right way to say _I’m sorry I can’t be of more help to you._ “It’s... My grace is almost gone now. I — I’m sorry.”

Dean narrows his eyes, confused.

“You’re sorry? Why?”

“Well I know that it’s useful to you, me having my powers, and I need to tell you that they... They might not come back this time. I’m practically human.”

Cas is shocked when Dean surges up to kiss him desperately, with a harsher edge than ever before, pressing hard against his lips, one hand coming up to curl possessively around the back of Cas’s neck, holding him in place. The kiss seems to go on much longer than normal, Dean pressing insistently forward, and Cas trying to match his frantic pace but feeling desperately confused and off balance.

Finally, Dean pulls back. He moves his hands to Cas’s cheeks and holds him there, determined. 

“I love you,” he says, voice cracking, and Cas blinks, confounded and pleased and overwhelmed, all at once. “I love you, and it doesn’t matter to me if you’re an angel or not. Got it?”

Dean seems desperate for Cas to understand, and Cas, as always, wants to give him what he needs.

“Okay,” he says, shock beginning to drift into awe, “you love me.”

He had hoped for this, thought it might be true. He never expected Dean to say it aloud.

Dean just nods, on the verge of frantic.

“Okay,” Cas repeats. “I love you, too.”

///

Dean’s confession alters Cas’s outlook on the loss of his grace.

Before, he believed the slow death of his angelic nature to be a curse, a thing to be feared. Dean needed him with full power. Dean wanted his “mojo.” Without it, what would Cas be to the Winchesters? But now, now, Cas can see that what’s most important to Dean is simply that he’s well.

Dean hovers around him, always asking Cas how he feels or if he needs anything. It’s been weeks since the incident with Ketch and the Men of Letters, and Cas’s injuries have healed. Some of the scars feel sensitive to the touch — “That happens when you get older,” Dean confided one night after a tender round of sex, because that’s something they do now, after they confessed their love to one another —but other than that, the dormant grace is the only lingering mark.

He’s considered it often, his grace. There’s just enough left within his vessel that basic self-healing functions seem to have returned, but not much else. He believes the grace will continue to keep his vessel maintained, because trapped in this body that is its primary function. Cas remains immortal.

Immortal life no longer appeals to him.

When he really evaluates his existence, Cas comes to the conclusion that he’s simply been an angel in species, not in function or mindset, for years now. He rebelled, left Heaven, earned the disdain of all the other angels, met God and discovered He wasn’t worth fighting for. Dean Winchester is worth fighting for. Sam and Eileen and even Mary are worth fighting for.

Humanity is worth fighting for. Maybe it’s worth joining, as well. Cas's first experience as a human had its struggles, its bleakness, but he always looks back upon that time and feels pride blooming in his chest — pride for his hard work, pride for all the emotions and experiences he learned about in a new light. Cas’s hand was forced into becoming an angel again. He never fully decided he wanted his old life back.

Perhaps it’s time for a new life, one that he chooses. After all, things are better down here on Earth with the people he loves.

///

Alicia Banes calls Dean’s cell phone while he works on the Impala.

“Cas,” Dean says from underneath the car, “can you get that for me?”

Alicia wants Dean’s input on a case, but Cas, with his wealth of knowledge concerning the supernatural, names the monster before she’s finished her description.

It starts a friendship of sorts. Alicia calls Cas for tips, and she and her twin Max occasionally give Cas dating advice in return. Alicia’s the romantic, clearly — “You two need to go out, eat somewhere without Sam, somewhere that doesn’t serve greasy fries” — and Max has a wealth of ideas about sex, many of which sound physically unfeasible. Cas enjoys speaking with both of them. They’re pleasant and they compliment each other nicely, and overall he feels comfortable speaking with them. It’s a rare feeling for him, to be comfortable with someone who doesn’t have the last name Winchester.

Cas likes the way it makes him feel valued, having friends outside of Sam and Dean, friends he can help but who also want to help him. He’d like to meet them in person someday.

Which may be why he asks them one day, “Can the two of you assist me with an angelic cleansing ritual?”

They have him on speaker phone, chatting about their day. They're wrapping up a case somewhere in Kentucky, something about a ghoul. After Cas asks his question, Alicia and Max remain uncharacteristically silent for several seconds.

“What do you want us to cleanse?” Max asks finally.

Cas walks to the door of his and Dean’s room and quickly scans the hall before answering.

“Me. I want you to cleanse me.”

Alicia unexpectedly bursts out laughing. 

“Ignore her,” Max says. “She says I’m the bad one, but I can promise you her mind just went to a very dirty place.”

“Hey!” Alicia protests, followed by muffled sounds like the siblings are scuffling with one another. Cas waits silently. Observing the more childish aspects of Sam and Dean’s relationship has taught him quite a bit about patience.

Finally, Alicia’s voice comes back over the line.

“What are we cleansing you of, exactly?”

Cas tells her.

There’s a long silence, then Alicia says, “Can you send us the spell?”

///

They come to an arrangement that all parties are comfortable with.

Max and Alicia want to take their time, pulling Cas’s grace from his body bit by bit. They propose meeting once a week to do the ritual. Cas wants to hurry the process along, take maybe three or four sessions to pull the sparse remnants out.

They agree on a schedule in the middle — he meets them in Topeka on Wednesdays (there’s an apothecary there open only one day a week that the twins are particularly fond of, so they use the meetings as a two-for-one deal) and then every other Saturday he drives to wherever they’re working, usually a surrounding state like Nebraska or Oklahoma. The three of them rent a motel room for a hour or two — Cas quickly learns that the reason this makes the twins feel “dirty” is because the clerks likely assume they’re having a ménage à trois — and then the ritual begins.

Cas modified the spell to call out his grace, and it’s fairly simple. The trouble with cleansing someone of grace rather than a disease, for example, is that grace has a mind of its own. A virus has one goal — to take over more cells. Grace is far more complicated, and Cas’s grace, weak though it may be, does not wish to leave him so easily.

So he lies on a different motel bed every week while the twins chant over him, feeling the faint movement under his skin, the sparking pain as the grace fights its banishment. Then he lies there longer once the ritual is over, waiting till he’s well enough to drive. The twins sit with him every time, watching documentaries he likes, telling Cas stories about their childhood which he trades for stories of his time as a warrior of God, many of them the same as the ones he tells Dean.

Alicia and Max don’t ask him questions about what they’re doing beyond the standard “Is this the right way to say this incantation in Enochian?” They don’t ask why he’s giving up his angelhood, why Dean doesn’t yet know. On days when he seems saddened by his loss, they’ll try to cheer him up. On the days when he’s more excited about becoming a human, they ask him questions about his plans for the future.

Those are the days Cas likes best, the days when he’s relieved to watch another bit of grace drain into the vial he carries, the days when he thinks about the rest of his life, his human life with the Winchesters, with an eager readiness.

///

Cas expected Dean to yell at him right away. He sits on their bed, very still, while Dean carefully closes the door, checks the locks and then slowly starts pulling off his clothes. Jacket, undershirt, boots, socks, pants. He folds them all carefully while standing in his underwear, his back to Cas as he stacks his clothes neatly into his duffle bag.

Cas bites his lip and waits it out. Dean goes to the bathroom, and Cas hears him brushing his teeth and washing his face. He slowly gets up, his knee cracking — something it does now, now that his grace is all but gone — and peels out of his own stuffy suit. Then he sits back down on the edge of the bed and waits some more.

Dean comes out of the bathroom, walks quietly over to the bed, and sits down next to Cas. He doesn’t speak for a long while.

Finally —

“How long did you know?”

Cas looks at his hands, too ashamed to look at the man next to him.

“About two weeks.”

In the silence that follows Cas hears the television blaring in the room next door. It sounds like a soap opera. Dean swallows hard, shuffling in place a little.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

This time Cas does look at Dean, but Dean stares straight ahead at the wall, tense in every line of his body.

“Sam asked me to wait. I decided it was his story to tell.”

Dean laughs a little, but it’s not a nice laugh.

“Right. You chose my brother and my mother over me. I get it.”

Well, that’s about enough of that. Cas reaches over to gently tug Dean’s chin so that Dean’s facing him. His green eyes are sad, tired. Cas rubs his thumb along Dean’s jawline.

“I’ll always choose you over anyone, Dean,” he says with steady conviction. “This was not me picking sides. It’s a family matter. I thought it best for Sam to explain his own reasoning for meeting with your mother.”

Dean leans his head into Cas’s hand, a gesture that seems both sadly defeated and relieved, and closes his eyes.

“Sam said you talked to her.”

Cas nods, even though Dean can’t see it with his eyes closed, still slowly rubbing at Dean’s stubble with his thumb.

“She called me about a week ago. She explained everything and apologized. Several times.”

Dean pulls away, looking somewhat reluctant to do so. He drops his gaze to his lap, and Cas tilts his head, watching and waiting for Dean to speak.

“Did you buy it? Her apology?”

“Yes,” Cas says, reaching over to place a hand on Dean’s knee. He needs to keep touching him. “She thought she was protecting the two of you from a potential threat. Me.”

“That’s insane, you —”

“I love you.” Dean looks back up at Cas, and his eyes are watery. “But she doesn’t know about that. She doesn’t know much about me at all, really, other than I’m angel. And the other angels do not love humans; this she does know from firsthand experience.”

“It’s no excuse for what they did to you.”

Cas sighs. He’s been tortured so often in his existence that this time with Ketch doesn’t rank particularly high on the list of events he knows he’ll have nightmares about as a human. Is that sad? Probably. But it’s true.

“No, it doesn’t excuse it. But that wasn’t your mother, Dean. That was all Ketch.” Dean mutters something that sounds suspiciously like, “And I’ll kill him for it,” and Cas waits patiently to continue. “Mary came to break me out as soon as she discovered what Ketch had planned.”

“She wouldn’t have had to break you out if she hadn’t put you there in the first place,” Dean says, and his knee starts to bounce, agitated. Cas continues to rub it soothingly, carefully feeling out the edges of the knobby bone with his pointer finger.

“True,” he concedes. “She made a poor decision. Which one of us hasn’t? I hurt Sam, once, gravely. You forgave me.”

Dean narrows his eyes.

“So you’re saying I have to forgive her?”

That’s not what Cas meant at all. He just wanted to point out Dean’s great capacity for forgiveness when it comes to those he loves, and the Winchesters’ (Cas included) great capacity for stupid choices.

“No. You’re not required to forgive anyone who hurts you, Dean. It’s entirely up to you whether you forgive Mary or not. Just as it’s up to Sam and I to decide whether we forgive her.”

“And you both do, just like that,” Dean says flatly.

“It’s our decision to make,” Cas insists quietly, more for Sam’s sake than his own, though Dean’s intense protective streak has tried to stop them both from making their own choices in the past. “Besides, I know what it’s like to hurt family in the name of protecting them. At least she can say she legitimately did not wish to harm me.”

Dean stays quiet for a while, picking at an invisible spot on the comforter between them. Cas wants to hold him, but he has a feeling he might not be allowed to once this conversation is over. There’s still more to tell.

“This isn’t all you’re keeping from me, though,” Dean says suddenly. He looks up at Cas. “Sam’s staying in Topeka to meet with Mary. Why are you staying, Cas?”

Cas intended to tell him anyway, from the moment he saw how upset Dean was with Sam for keeping his meetings with Mary secret. He hoped for the right moment, but he supposes there’s never a right moment to tell your partner you decided to switch species behind their back.

He does his best to look Dean in the eye as he says, “I’ve been meeting with the Banes on a semi-regular schedule.” Dean starts to ask “What?” but Cas pushes on, “They’ve been helping me siphon out my grace.”

Cas isn’t sure what he expected — an explosive argument calling back to their old days, maybe, with raised voices and heated words. He expected to be pushed on the defensive immediately, explaining why he felt he had to do this, why he kept it from Dean.

Instead Dean just shakes his head slowly, then drops his face into his hands.

All the potential arguments Cas built for this moment drain away, replaced by concern.

“Dean?” He hesitantly rests a hand on Dean’s back.

Dean mutters something into his palms.

“I can’t hear you,” Cas says, then adds quietly, “Most of my grace is gone, now, and that includes what you called my ‘super hearing.’”

Dean lifts his head from his hands just enough so his mouth isn’t pressed into his palms, but Cas still can’t see his face clearly.

“Why would you want to do that?” Dean asks shakily. “That’s your gift to me? To become human?”

Cas blinks. He vaguely recalls telling Dean once that his plans were a surprise for him. He thought at the time that surely Dean would feel excited when he realized that all the dangers of the ritual had passed, when Cas stood before him human and home to stay forever. It seems he miscalculated, though he’s not sure how.

“Well, I did it for myself,” Cas says uneasily, “but I won’t pretend that you didn’t influence the decision.”

Dean’s still not looking at him.

“You erased,” he says, sounding choked, “thousands of years of your history, _for me_?”

“Dean!” Alarmed at Dean’s tone, Cas again catches his chin and tips it toward him. Dean looks like he’s about to cry. “This isn’t a bad thing, it’s...”

“Why didn’t you tell me if it’s not a bad thing?” Dean asks haltingly, moving his chin out of Cas’s grasp.

“Because the ritual is somewhat unsteady and I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily; because I knew it would be fine. The Banes are very capable witches.” Cas is entirely unsure why Dean still looks so upset — and not angry, just sad. Almost frightened. “Dean, this next meeting is likely to be the last time they’ll need to see me to pull the grace out, you can come with me and see it for yourself or...” 

Cas gets up from the bed, quickly moving to the desk where he sat his bag and pulling out the old spell book he took from the bunker. 

“See, I’ve been studying the spell, improving upon it, so it’s safer and safer every time and...” Dean just stares at him, terrified. “Dean, please say something.”

Dean closes his eyes, shudders.

“I’m not worth it,” is what he says, so softly that Cas barely catches it.

“Dean.” He puts everything into the word, the name he loves above all names. His concern, his understanding, his love. Cas sets the spell book down and quickly crosses the room, kneeling in front of Dean and gently pulling his hands away from his face.

“Dean,” he says again when Dean finally looks at him, panicked and uncertain, tears pooling in his eyes. “Why on earth would you say that?”

“I can’t keep my family together, Cas,” Dean says, and though he lets Cas hold his face between his hands Dean’s eyes dart wildly around the room, like he’s looking for an escape route. “I never can. Even Sam's left me when I begged him not to, my dad ignored me except for when it was time to go on hunts, my own mother, I thought she...” Dean breaks off, making a wet, gasping noise. “She loved me in all of my memories, but she...”

“Oh, Dean.” Cas’s heart breaks for him. He reaches one hand up to push his fingers gently through Dean’s hair. “She does love you.”

“She left,” Dean spits out, warring between angry and devastated. “She left and she didn’t come back and she hurt you and I can never keep anyone with me, not even you, you always leave, Cas, I can’t, you can’t possibly want this forever, you’ll resent me for it, I know you will....”

 _How could I have missed this,_ Cas wonders. How could he have missed the underlying cause for all this anger — Dean’s great fear of losing those he loves. He’s already decided Sam chose Mary over him, and now he thinks Cas will one day regret his own choice, a human life with Dean.

“Look at me,” Cas commands, and Dean does, though his whole body stays tense, ready for flight. “Let me tell you why I chose to become human. I... I missed it, Dean, as insane as that sounds. I missed feeling everything so deeply, I missed the sense of camaraderie I felt with all these people I’ve been fighting for for years, I missed eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” Dean huffs a tired laugh at that, and Cas smiles. “Not all of it was good, no, but neither is being an angel. And I don’t have any ties to Heaven anymore, Dean. No reasons to want to keep my grace, other than to heal you.” He touches two fingers to Dean’s forehead in a pantomime of healing. “But my grace was already too weak to do even that, anymore. So I decided to go ‘all in,’ as you would say, for something I truly believe in — humanity. My family. You.”

“What I missed most, though,” Cas adds, when Dean’s sniffling slows, “was the feeling I had when I first realized all my potential as a human to be a more steady companion to you. As an angel I always got pulled away, or felt I needed to fulfill some sense of duty to Heaven. As a human I only wanted to get to you and Sam.”

Dean looks down. “Cas —”

“No, don’t feel guilty about how things turned out then. It’s over now, Dean, and it’s forgiven. And I’m human again, or soon to be, and all I want is to stay with you. For the rest of my human life. I won’t regret that longing, either, nor will I let you feel guilty for it. I might be almost human, but I’ve spent thousands of years as an angel, and angels are programmed for extreme devotion to a singular cause. I spent all that time serving a God who didn’t care about me, what makes you think I would regret spending the next forty or fifty years devoted to the man who loves me?”

“Jesus,” Dean mutters, then says, “Way to make that come out like a proposal, Cas.”

He’s clearly aiming for a joking tone, but Cas hears the desperation there, the hope. So he won’t make this a joke, because it isn’t one.

“If you’ll have me, it is a proposal of sorts,” he says, and Dean looks up, shocked. “Obviously we can’t get legally married — you’re supposed to be dead, and I don’t technically exist by any government code — but we can commit to stay together.” He takes a deep breath, suddenly nervous. “Forever. If that would be satisfactory to you.”

“Jesus,” Dean says again, still looking flabbergasted. “This is not the turn I expected this conversation to take.”

Cas smiles, rubbing his thumbs along Dean’s cheekbones, clearing away the tear tracks.

“I just needed to make sure you understood my intentions.”

Dean leans forward so his forehead touches Cas’s.

“Yeah, yeah, understood. Um, yes, obviously, yes, I want you around however long you’re willing to stay.” Dean lets out a shaky laugh. “I’m still kind of pissed at you though, Cas. You should have told me — well, all of this.”

Cas will take a mild reprimand any day, so long as it also comes with a boost to Dean’s self-esteem.

“That’s fine,” he says, letting go of Dean briefly to sit on the bed next to him, satisfied when Dean’s arm immediately goes around his shoulders. “I am sorry. I should have told you about the grace sooner, in any case. This was... This was not the reaction I expected you to have, either.”

Dean sighs, leaning his forehead against Cas’s shoulder.

“I’m coming with you, the next time you see the Banes.”

Cas nods. He did expect that.

“Maybe... Maybe I’ll go with Sam, too. Hear her side.”

Cas just hums in slight agreement, not wanting to say anything to change Dean’s mind on that point. Dean moves his head so he’s staring at the side of Cas’s face.

“I get it, you know,” Dean says, and Cas turns to him, relieved to see that other than his puffy eyes Dean's face is cleared of all sadness now. “I'm controlling, and you both thought I would stop you from doing your thing. But I still don’t think it’s cool for you guys to keep shit like this from me. It's crappy, really.” Cas nods, chagrined. “So if I go with Sam to meet Mary, I’ll be civil, but I expect you two to start keeping me in the loop.”

“Agreed,” Cas says. “I’m sure Sam will agree, too. He loves you more than anything, including your mother." Dean nods, then huffs a quiet laugh. "We both love you, you know.”

Then he leans over and kisses the tip of Dean’s nose, something that always seems to oddly delight Dean.

Sure enough, Dean grins crookedly and then playfully bumps Cas’s shoulder with his own, rolling his eyes.

“Sap,” he says. “Let’s go to bed.”


	4. Mary

They leave her alone in the war room to contemplate what she's done.

Mary pulls out a chair at the map table while her boys help a stumbling Castiel to a bedroom in the back. He's disoriented and in pain, but by the look of his injuries — mostly cuts and bruises — she expects him to make a full recovery.

Whether her relationship with her boys will ever recover from this is another question altogether.

Her phone vibrates in her pocket for what has to be the tenth time since they escaped the Brits’ compound, and this time Mary pulls it out without hesitation.

“What have you done?” a familiar voice asks. She can practically hear the sneer.

“Don’t ever call me again,” Mary says to Ketch. “Don’t ever try to recruit my boys again. After what you did —”

“Oh, please.” Ketch scoffs. “Don’t pretend like you didn’t play your part in this, Mary. You practically delivered the angel to me, gift-wrapped and all.”

She clutches the phone tighter, anger and guilt rising with the heat in her cheeks. She hates him, she hates them all. She hates herself.

“If you touch any of them again, I’ll kill you.”

Mary hangs up, then bashes the phone against the table with all her strength, shattering it into pieces. She’ll never hear his slimy voice begging her to join the team ever again.

In her fury Mary didn’t notice Dean, standing in the doorway, hands bloody to match her shirt. Castiel’s blood, shed unnecessarily, and it — all of it — is on her.

They don’t say anything for a while, silently staring at each other. She wonders what she looks — face red, eyes and hair wild, coming down from an adrenaline rush brought on by fear and panic. She knows what her son looks like — blank, face composed into a mask she can’t read.

“Dean —” She starts, then stops. What can she say? Dean is made of stone, unmoved.

Then Sam comes in behind him, and they both move slowly to the war table, still keeping on the other side, away from her.

“Sam, Dean,” Mary begins again. “I can’t say anything —”

“Damn right you can’t,” Dean interrupts, abrupt. “So get out.”

Mary pauses, mouth open. She expected screaming, ranting. Not this. Not this silent judgment, this even-keeled declaration. She looks at Sam, who looks to the floor, silent. He’s deferring to his brother.

“Don’t look at him,” Dean snaps, cold veneer finally cracking, and Mary’s head whips toward him. He’s thawing, lips curling into a sneer. “He’s not gonna take your side. After what you did, no one here is gonna take your side.”

“Please, Dean —”

“Don’t.” Dean points a finger up the stairs, at the door. “Get out. And don’t come back. Don’t call, don’t write. Just leave. I never want to see your face again.” His voice wavers slightly, but his face is still calm. And yet there’s a barely composed rage there that’s just starting to shine through. He reminds her of John whenever he would get really, truly angry. “You’re not welcome here anymore, Mary.”

_Mary._ Not Mom, Mary. Mom is the ghost who cut the crusts off his sandwiches and tucked him into bed at night, the woman who loved her sons more than anything, who had a beloved husband and a beautiful home and a chance at a life without monsters. That woman died three decades ago.

Mary disappoints. She lets her sons down, she leaves them, she pretends that the more monsters she kills the lighter the burden of her legacy will be. She allowed a sadist to hurt their best friend, she took up a spot at the table of their enemies. She runs from her problems, runs from her boys. Fight or flight, and she chooses flight every time.

Their mother would stay, beg for forgiveness, promise that she loves them. Mary doesn’t feel like a mother. She doesn’t feel like anyone. She's only numb.

She turns and bolts up the stairs, out the door and into the night.

///

A week after Dean kicks her out Mary stops at a Wal-Mart and goes through the confusing process of buying a phone, only this time there’s no Sam to tell her which one does what or what plan she needs to be on. A pimply teenage salesperson guides her to a flip phone and she gratefully accepts it, plugging in the only three numbers she knows — Dean’s, Sam’s and Castiel’s.

She can’t call any of them.

Mary sits in her car in the Wal-Mart parking lot, head against the headrest, eyes closed, phone in hand. She’s never felt more aware of how alone she is in this world, not even on the first day after Dean sent her away. She’s been driving and driving, crossing state line after state line, but soon she’ll hit a coast and there will be nowhere to go but back toward Kansas, and no one to go home to once she gets there.

She opens her eyes to see a family of three — a mother and two little children, a boy and a girl, loading their groceries into the back of a mini van. The little boy valiantly tries to help his mother, while the little girl swings her legs idly in the buggy seat, chewing on the end of her pigtails.

Mary feels herself start to tear up, watching them. They’re not doing anything remarkable, but they’re everything she used to want. A mundane, normal family. Everything she’ll never have.

She reaches up to turn the keys and start the engine, fully aware that particular fantasy died with her the first time around, or maybe it never really existed in the first place. And maybe that’s the problem with her. She can’t get used to living again after a Heaven where only her most perfect memories played on a loop. 

Mary keeps her hand on the keys for far too long, lost in thought, wondering _why can’t I be a mother?_ When she looks back up the family is gone, their spot taken by a beat-up truck.

Without thinking too much about it, she sends a text to Sam.

“Hi, it’s me. Mary. I understand if you don’t want to hear from me, but I just wanted to let you know, should you ever need me, this is my new number.”

She’s driving down the highway, back west, when she gets a text with just one word — “OK.”

///

After Sam texts her, Mary gets a job in Topeka.

It’s too much, she knows, to stake the future of her relationship with her sons on one word, but it’s all she has. He responded to her. Maybe he’ll respond more in the future. Maybe one day they can meet in person and she can confess that she doesn’t know how to be a mother anymore but she misses her boys nonetheless.

She worked at a diner for two years after she and John first married, as a hostess and a waitress, making money to take night classes at the community college. She envisioned herself becoming a nurse one day, though her first pregnancy derailed those dreams and replaced them with new ones. 

The manager at her new job, Gina, guides her through the basics — the diner is old-fashioned, thank God, and actually uses the exact same cash register Mary remembers from the restaurant she worked at it Lawrence. Taking orders is simple — she took them from her father her whole life, after all, and forgetting to follow an instruction from Samuel Campbell was tantamount to full-scale insurrection — but smiling falsely for customers is more difficult.

One day, Gina pulls her aside.

“Mary,” she says, all forced politeness. “You have to act like you actually want to be here, at least in front of our customers, or I’ll have to let you go.”

“Right,” Mary says. “I’m sorry; I’ll try harder.”

And she does. She pretends every scowling child is Dean, every crying baby Sam.

She can’t pretend anything for the adult men that come through. Every time she tries, all she can come up with is John smiling at her or Dean saying “Mary” through gritted teeth.

///

Meeting with Sam doesn’t bring her the comfort she hoped it might.

He calls her Mom while he lists out John’s sins, then drives away to leave her to herself, crying in her car outside of a motel room, despairing of the love of her life, dead, feared and resented by his sons. 

_Their_ sons. They belong to her, too, though most days she’s not sure if she will ever belong to them.

She hunts on her off days, meets with Sam in between shifts while she works. He talks about Eileen and she finally feels a faint pulse of happiness in her chest. He skirts around the subject of Dean and she doesn’t know what to say.

They talk about the Brits, Ketch, Castiel, angels and demons and her sons’ time in Hell. She tells him it’s her fault, all of it, and he only says, “How could you have known?” 

She didn’t know exactly what Azazel wanted, true, but Mary should have known that demon deals always come with a hefty price.

One day she asks how Sam can forgive her for what happened to Cas when Dean can’t. It’s not an accusation toward her eldest son; Mary truly doesn’t expect Dean to forgive her. But Sam’s still here, still talking to her in the parking lot of the diner whenever he can get away, and she needs to know why.

He doesn’t answer for a long time, then he softly says, not looking directly at her, “Well, Dean and Cas are... they’re very close.”

Mary raises her eyebrows at the implications, though she’s fully aware times have changed and it’s not her place to say anything, really, if that’s how Dean finds his happiness. She wants him to be happy. She regrets almost taking that away from him.

But Sam’s not done.

“And, also I — I need to tell you something else,” he says. He’s still staring across the parking lot at the faded sign that says “Deb’s Diner” in light blue. There's a woman in rollerskates on it, carrying a plate with a cheeseburger. “It’s about your dad.”

The story he tells her of how Samuel Campbell came back from the dead is not a pretty one. It gets uglier and uglier, this tale of betrayals and soullessness and grief-driven madness and monsters both human and otherwise, and when Sam says, “I shot him,” Mary can’t say anything in return.

They sit in silence for several minutes, Mary’s fingers twitching, itching for a cigarette, until her phone beeps for the start of her shift.

“I won’t come back if you don’t want me to,” Sam tells her as they stand up. “I... I'll understand.”

“Can you just give me a few days, please,” she says, and he nods. Mary walks inside, tears pricking at her eyes. Her father, her husband, her precious little boys — there’s no one safe it seems, from the darkness. There’s no memory she holds that can’t be corrupted.

She texts Sam three days later.

“We’re family. I’ll always love you, no matter what.”

It’s true, but even as she types it Mary wonders if she really is part of the family, or if she still belongs to the past, tethered to the happier fragments of people who don’t exist anymore.

She feels hollow.

///

Castiel talks even more formally on the phone, like the method of communication changes his delivery. Or maybe he’s just uncomfortable speaking with Mary. That’s probably more likely.

Sam sits across the table from Mary in her dinky motel room, slowly working his way through a take-out carton of fries she brought back from the diner, clearly amused by the awkward turn the conversation has taken now that they’re past the apologies.

Mary had innocently asked Castiel why he loved humans so much more than the other angels, only intending to subtly say that now she understands he’s very different from the majority of his brethren, but Castiel launched into a speech on angelic politics that’s continued for at least ten minutes. She has him on speaker, staring hopelessly at Sam, who grins and gives her a thumbs up.

“I don’t really know how angels are programmed, exactly,” Castiel is saying, his voice tinny and gruff. “We — and by we I mean anyone below the top tiers of the seraphim and the archangels — are not kept ‘in the loop’ —" He’s definitely borrowing that term from someone, most likely Dean — “about those matters. We tend to focus in on our function, or mission. I was a warrior for many years, you know, so I spent most of my time prepping for battle.”

Mary says, “Mmhmm,” and Sam chuckles behind a fist. It’s not that she doesn’t find angels fascinating, but she can’t even remember her original question anymore. Castiel keeps going off on tangents.

“In any case, one of my superiors once told me I was always broken, and I believe she meant I’d been programmed wrong. But I believe it’s more of a case of nurture over nature, because even if I rebelled in small ways before, meeting Dean and then Sam was the true catalyst for my embrace of free will.” _Ah, that was the question._ Why does he love humans? Because of her sons, the men who helped an angel to fall. She smiles slightly. She always told Dean angels were watching over him. At least one still is. “I think that yes, I was always predisposed to rebellion, to a greater love for humanity, but that's not a design flaw. It's a component of my personality your sons helped bring out even more. They’re very inspiring, Sam and Dean.”

Sam grins and says, “Thanks, Cas. Hey man, while I have you on the line can we talk about our plan to bring Dean in on all this?”

Sam takes the phone and he and Castiel start talking about Castiel’s grace extraction process. Mary stirs some sugar into her coffee, watching her son animatedly speak with his best friend, and she hopes that maybe one day she can meet with Castiel in person, hear more of his stories.

She hopes one day she can meet with Dean, too.

///

“I told him I didn’t love him.”

Mary watches Ellen Weatherby closely, arm wrapped tightly around the older woman. She found Ellen in a field after following a trail of bodies. Luckily she was able to exorcise the demon inside her without further bloodshed, but Ellen's clearly shell-shocked, shaking and breathing heavily. She saw and heard everything — the screams of the people murdered by her hands, the terror brought on by her black eyes, the hateful words the demon spit at her husband.

Ellen sobs into Mary’s shoulder.

“That thing, it saw my darkest thoughts and it, it —” She cuts off with a gasp. “It told Gerald about the affair, about how I wanted to leave him, it told him I didn’t love him.” Ellen cries and cries. “That was thirty years ago! Everything is different now, but now he knows all the terrible things I’ve done.” She looks at her bloody hands, and Mary gently pulls them down to her lap, covering them up with her own. “He knows I’m not his perfect wife. He’ll hate me. _I hate me,_ all those people and I killed...” Ellen starts sobbing again, and Mary feels powerless to do anything except rub her back.

“The things that happened while that demon was inside you, the people it hurt — that’s not your fault, and you have to accept that,” she says quietly. “The things you did of your own volition, those are the things you’ll have to make up for.”

“I know,” Ellen whimpers. “I know, I know, but how can I ever... I’ll see them in my dreams.” Her voice drops off, becoming nearly incoherent. “How can I ever accept any of it?”

There’s no good answer for that. 

Mary sees the Impala at the edge of the field, knows it must be Eileen and the boys. She told Eileen about this case, but she didn’t expect to see them here, too. 

Dean steps out of the car. He spots her and his eyes narrow.

“I don’t know how you accept the things done to you,” Mary tells Ellen, watching Eileen take off across the field toward them. Dean, Sam and Castiel hang back. “And I don’t know how you make up for the things you did to others.”

///

Sam asks to meet with her again, but not on Saturday like they originally planned. He asks Mary to go out to eat with him the Thursday after the Weatherby case wrapped. 

He brings Dean.

“Hey,” she says softly as the boys pull back their chairs. “It’s good to see you two.”

“Hey, Mom.” Sam smiles at her, genuine and happy. “Cas wanted to come, but his grace extraction process just ended yesterday so he’s still kind of groggy.”

“Oh.” She looks at Dean, who stares at his menu like he’s deciphering an ancient text. “Is he all right?” She remembers Sam saying something about the process being somewhat unstable.

“He’s fine,” Dean says gruffly, not looking at her. 

“He’s watching _Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt_ at the motel.” Sam bumps Dean’s shoulder with his, none too subtly. “He was all excited about eating food and not tasting molecules, so Dean ordered him a whole box of Krispy Kreme donuts this morning. Cas ate them all in one sitting. That’s honestly affecting him more than anything else right now.”

Mary smiles gratefully at Sam. _Thank you for trying._

“Well, that’ll definitely do it. Dean would know." She looks cautiously at him. "When you were four, I once caught you eating a blueberry pie straight out of the pan. You had eaten almost three-fourths of it by the time I dragged you away. You threw up blueberries all night, it was the nastiest thing.”

Dean narrows his eyes at her, and Sam laughs, somewhat uncomfortably. Mary sighs. Thankfully a waiter comes by just in time to rescue them from the awkward silence, taking drink and food orders before running off again, leaving the Winchesters to sit and stare at one another.

“I’m sorry,” Mary says, to get it out and to break the tension. “I’m sorry about Cas, Dean, I’m so...”

“I know.” Dean plays with his butter knife, absent-mindedly twirling it around in one hand. Mary wonders if he even realizes he’s doing it. “Cas and Sam told me everything. I know you’re sorry.”

Mary looks at Sam, but he’s watching his brother carefully.

“The thing is,” Dean continues, “I’ve thought a lot about it the past couple of days, and I can forgive you for that if Cas can. And he has. Hell, I even kind of get it — you don’t know him, not really, and the Brits are real big on convincing everyone that everything inhuman is a monster. Doesn’t make it right, but you were running with them for a while. It makes sense you’d buy their theory, makes sense you’d want to protect Sam and me from a threat.”

“I did want to protect you,” she says, earnest. “I still do —”

“The problem is, if you had spent any time with us at all you would have known how much Cas means to us. How much he means to me.” Dean’s voice cracks a little. “You would have already known about the Grigori and how Cas helped kill one. You would have known about all the times he's saved my life, in all these different ways. You would have known about our friend Garth — he’s a werewolf — or Benny, the vampire who helped get me out of Purgatory. You would have known that hunting is different for us, that we don’t just kill people because they’re not human. But you don’t know any of that. You don’t know anything about us, because you couldn’t wait to get away from us.”

“Dean,” Sam says warningly, and Dean holds up a hand.

“Now, I get needing space, so we gave it to you,” he says, and Mary bites her lip. “I’ve come back from the dead before. I know it’s disorienting. I know how wrong it feels, to be walking and talking when you should be rotting in the ground. It had to be even worse for you. But Mom —” He called her Mom, and Mary’s ears are ringing. “— you never came back. You stayed away. You texted us some, called us every now and then. But you...” He trails off, and Mary sees his eyes start to water. “For fuck’s sake, you acted like we weren’t even your kids, just adults who shared their names.”

She looks at Sam, and he nods slightly.

“It did kind of feel like that,” Sam confesses. 

“And I’m glad you and Sam are working things out,” Dean adds. “I mean, I was friggin’ pissed that he kept it from me, but... I get it. He never knew you.” He looks at his brother. “This is easier for you, I guess. You don’t have any template, here.” Dean turns back to Mary. “And my childhood memories of you don’t match up with the real deal, which I know it isn’t fair of me to expect them to, but honestly...” He sighs. “I was disappointed because the mom I remembered was always this light for me, the one parent I knew loved me.”

Mary nods shakily, tears starting to drip down her cheeks.

“I understand,” she says. “I do love you, though, Dean. Just because this is hard for me, difficult to adjust to, doesn’t mean I don’t love you. I do, I do.”

“I know. And I know you were disappointed, too,” Dean says quietly. “We weren’t what you wanted, or at least our lives aren’t the lives you wanted for us. So I guess we have to work out reconciling all this shit.”

“You are what I wanted, though,” she says, and until she said it Mary’s not sure she was even aware of how true that statement is. Sam and Dean look at her, wide-eyed. “No, I didn’t want you to be raised like you were. But you, both of you, you’re good men. Great men. You saved the world.” She tries to smile, but it’s kind of hard to cry and smile at the same time. “You cleaned up all the messes my deal opened up, and I don’t know how to be around you, knowing the pain I caused you, knowing how incredible you are, none of it thanks to me. I tried to make it up to you, to make the world safer for you, and I just fucked it up more. I don’t deserve you.”

“Mom,” Sam says, and he reaches across the table for her hand, just like she did for him all those weeks ago. “That’s absolutely untrue. We’ve all broken the world, here.” He looks at Dean, who says quietly, “More than once.” Sam continues, “It’s kind of a Winchester thing.”

Dean nods, wiping at his eyes.

“The Winchester family crest — ‘saving people, hunting things, fucking over the world.’”

They all laugh a little, a strange, teary-eyed, smiling trio.

“Dean and I talked about this,” Sam says after a moment of quiet, “and we agreed that maybe we should try this family thing again. If you want, you can move into the bunker. If you’re not ready, we can keep meeting you here.”

Mary looks at her sons — Sam, calm and composed, so willing to make compromises for the people he loves, and Dean, a little more raw and bruised, clearly afraid of her answer. And she knows what she needs to do.

///

The table in the bunker’s kitchen is loaded, covered in burgers, chips and queso, various grilled vegetables and one delicious, homemade apple pie that Dean slaved over, shooing away anyone who tried to sneak an early bite.

They’re supposed to be talking strategy — after all, the people in this room are the main shield between the world and Lucifer, the British Men of Letters and various other threats, supernatural and human. But right now Sam and Dean are retelling a story from their childhood, one about Sam pretending to be Superman and then breaking his arm trying to fly, and everyone's listening to them. 

Sam’s laughing, arm thrown around Eileen, who watches Dean’s lips intently as he describes Sam’s leap into the unknown. Cas smiles placidly, dressed down for the first time Mary can recall, one hand on Dean’s knee. His grace, a faint blue light, hangs in a vial around Dean’s neck. Dean flaps his arms, mocking Sam’s fall, and Sam throws a napkin at his face.

Mary smiles. 

She feels full.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you made it to the end, thank you so much for reading! 
> 
> If you'd like to share this story with others, there's a tumblr post to reblog [here!](https://spncanonbigbang.tumblr.com/post/163544332971/fight-or-flight)
> 
> And of course, kudos and comments are always appreciated!


End file.
